Tag: acme
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
Note: It’s best to open the videos in full screen. Also I have added a few line breaks or readability in the code snippets that will make them not work correctly. It’s not hard to find where they are, if you run into any problems let me know.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been using Acme and related Plan 9 from User Space utilities lately. One of its pieces is the plumber.
Text editors. You hate them or love them. Praise them with religious zeal, and attack them with the same power. I’ve been an emacs user for the last 8 years, getting as deep as I could without checking the source. And the past few months I have started using evil-mode in emacs, to get some taste of vim in my daily editing (mostly text objects.)
There’s still a third contestant in editor-land, for me.
Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Image copyrighted by Lucent Technologies, hosted by Wikimedia Commons and posted here for information purposes
A few months ago I wrote about how I’m using vim in my ipad. You know, I’m an emacs guy, just started writing my own (useful) stuff to improve it. Recently I finished gnusnotes.el, a package which allows you to easily add notes to emails. Of course, before this I had already written emacs code, just that it was only for me.
Tag: adtech
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
Finishing and posting this got lost in a task manager reorganisation, it was due in June-July.
The last of 2020.
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Tag: agile
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with 400+ articles. I “trimmed” it down to “only” 380 during this week, I had a lot of airport time due to going to Spark Summit Europe to give a talk.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Tag: airflow
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model, with change over time.
Next week I start a new job 😮
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model.
Tag: akka
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
A few months ago I stumbled into the problem of Akka logging, specifically
ClassNotFoundException when using akka.event.slf4j.Slf4jLoggingFilter, just by
following the details of the Logging - SL4J section of Akka
documentation.
Tag: alloy
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model, with change over time.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Tag: apache-druid
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
It has been a while since my previous data paper. This time I tackle a less known one.
Tag: apache-kafka
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
This has been a really tough week.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
Tag: apache-spark
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
This turned out a long one
Meetings galore.
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Happy new year!
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
Days of fire Kafka and thunder SSL.
This Apache Spark feature has made us scratch our heads way too much.
I had a very entertaining week.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
Sweet, sweet holidays.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
Hive is arguably old. It is also undoubtedly useful, even now: 10 years after it was introduced.
The video edition
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
Managing logging in Spark ain’t easy, and is even harder in managed clouds like Databricks or EMR.
The last of 2020.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
This is a short edition.
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
This is the next instalment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers in the data space.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
After reading the Snowflake paper, I got curious about how similar engines work. Also, as I mentioned in that article, I like knowing how the data sausage is made. So, here I will summarise the Delta Lake paper by Databricks.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
The one where Airflow messes with you.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames (the successor of GraphX on Spark).
Almost two months ago (time sure flies) I attended for the second time the conference Scala eXchange, one of the largest Scala conferences in the world, and which happens to be 1 tube stop from the office you can find me from time to time in London.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Shading dependencies with sbt-assembly (in particular, shapeless in Spark 2.1.0)
1 minutes read | 141 words
A few weeks ago I needed to parse configuration files in Scala for a Spark project and decided to use PureConfig. It is incredibly lean to use, needing minimal boilerplate. I recommend you check it out (give also a look at CaseClassy, which I haven’t had time to test yet).
Everything seemed straightforward enough, and I got it working pretty quickly (as in, it compiled properly). The surprise? spark-submit failed with a conflict with Shapeless (lacking a witness).
Tag: apl
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
A few weeks ago I started trying a pre-beta release of Dyalog APL (now available as “full beta”) for Mac. Fellow Mac users, looks like we are in for a treat after so much time of only having GNU APL and the pretty expensive APLX. Now Mac APL lovers, users and aficionados will have a competitive, commercial option. At last!
I started with the usual 1+1, ⍳ 10 , ⍴ ⍳ 10 to check it worked as expected.
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
Tag: apple
Christmas edition!
Tag: awk
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
This is a short edition.
Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things
Tag: aws
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
I had a very entertaining week.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.
Managing logging in Spark ain’t easy, and is even harder in managed clouds like Databricks or EMR.
A relatively common type of query for time-based SQL tables is a find the gap query. How can you do this in AWS Redshift, which does not have the SQL function generate_series?
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
Tag: basketball
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
My chair, my fractals (A4) and my Drazen
Petrovic poster (4xA4)
Rasterbator is an online poster maker, for you to print in your own printer. Of course, the results are not as good as full quality posters like these, but they look pretty good when looked from afar. It rasterises an image you upload (or link from anywhere in Internet), does some magic stuff, and the result is a bunch (you decide graphically how many, orientation and other options) of A4 (or Legal) sheets arranged in a nice PDF, which you have to print.
Tag: big-data
Back on track.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Tag: bizarre
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
From Flickr
No, this is not a tutorial (but I do have written the standard steps to learn below). I began learning to juggle very recently. I just want to answer a possible “why”?
I’ve always been fascinated by juggling, and every time I wanted to eat more than 2 small oranges I’d try my hand at juggling them. Always followed by bowing and picking them from the ground, of course.
Next week is the final exam of the course I’m giving, Numerical Analysis. Classes finished before Christmas, and this week is for students questions. I had one of these sessions this morning, when a pair of students came with a few questions related to the problems I solved on the blackboard.
All were quick to solve, until one simple question arose, concerning a trivial problem in Calculus 1 (or Analysis 1, as we name it here).
Santa brought me the gift I wanted for Christmas: a pyrograph. In case you don’t know, a pyrograph is a tool to draw over wood, by burning it.
As you may already know, I love drawing (in particular, ink drawing). This is similar: you don’t have a lot of control over tone and a mistake can ruin the drawing.
This was the first time I used one, and to test how it worked I decided to draw a Celtic knot over a wooden box.
Doesn’t it look nice?
Last week Laia and me went to a toy/book/stuff shop to buy a music stand. Practising guitar without a music stand was starting to feel rather odd. While we were there, we bought several more items, among them an old time favourite from myself: a mirror rubik cube. An addition to my keychain cube, SuperCube, 5x5 cube and Rubik dodecahedron. I had only seen it online, from Amazon.
Three months ago Oscar Del Ben posted an interesting post in his blog, FreestyleMind. In it he said that he saved (quite) a lot of money and a lot of back pain with a special office chair: he uses a gym ball.
The gym ball in question is the one used in yoga or Pilates training. They come in two sizes, 65 cm 75cm (diameter). I had recurring back pain, and decided to give it a try at home.
As I posted in Best Posts I Have Read in June and July, I liked a lot a numerical experiment in Re: Factor, a blog about learning the Factor programming language. The idea comes from another blog, this time about Clojure (a Lisp dialect running in the Java Virtual Machine), based on a footnote from Prime Obsession (Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
The 100 most common words in Icelandic, automatically generated from Wikipedia
3 minutes read | 556 wordsThe file can be downloaded at the end of the post
As you may already know, I’m travelling to Iceland this July, and started learning Icelandic a few months ago. It advances slowly but firmly, but I found a problem:when you are self-learning a new language, an invaluable tool is a list of most common words.
Maybe you remember my previous post about detection of copied assignments? Well, now I can say it succeeded. CJuicer is a flex script, generating a lexycal analyzer with a rudimentary parser of C code, it outputs a PostScript with the “logical tree” of loops, function calls and conditionals. Same trees, copied assignment (unless it is simple code, then almost everyone writes the same), without problems with changing names of variables. Thus it could beat diff.
Lena Söderberg
I am working in my free time in an image processing related program, and this made me remember when I was taking a course in Signal Processing. One of the standard test images was the one above. Where does this historical image processing snippet come from?
Turns out (wikipedia link) it is a standard folklore image, dating back to the seventies, when a bunch of electrical engineers needed an image satisfying certain signal problems (it is, indeed, an image with a lot of significative details, when compressing, denoising or whatever: the hat, the uniform colour distribution except for a few patches of different color…).
Last Friday, 20, all SongsInCode’rs were asked to try to get #songsincode trending again to commemorate the 3 months anniversary of the idea. I submitted 3 songs (far less than my first outburst)… and almost no-one else tried to overwhelm twitter with his songs (a few did, and with great ideas ;)
KISS - know=“you cry”;know++=“Walk street beside her”; PassBy(); everybody: puts(“Looks good”); you: puts(“Strutter”); goto everybody;
Duran Duran - if(!
Last weekend I attended a conference in Denmark, and a colleague I met there showed me the logo of his University. It is supposed to be a coral… but he said in every party they turn it 270º, so it is the “angry elk”.
Related postsParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
A few days ago I found a page via StumbleUpon, and caught my inner geek. Songs in code, a trend in twitter a few days ago. Other examples here, and here (twitter). Below my own creations.
(setq My ‘(sleeping)) - Roxette
do{love( );}while(TRUE); - The Beatles
while(1){puts(“Young”);} - Alphaville
love( ); puts(“Now”); - Roxette
do{ }while(b*tchslaprappin&&cocainetongue); - Guns N’ Roses
if(!say){say=MAXINT;} - Ronan Keating
int love=0; if(friday){love=1;} - The Cure
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
When you are about to send a file to ArXiV, it greets you with the following confirmation message, just before the “Click here”:
Now Processing Submission
Read carefully the information below, recite aloud the English alphabet backwards starting from Z, breathe deeply, read carefully the information below once again, and then with a suitable pause (at least 10 seconds) you should
CLICK HERE TO CHECK STATUS
It made me lough quite a bit a few months ago :)
While on Paris, I spotted several Space Invaders. Sadly, I wasn’t aware enough, as there are plenty.
I love the smell of old (really old, but not dusty) books. It reminds me of some kind of vanilla scent, that is only to be found in them. I smelled it a few weeks ago, when I bought Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, second hand 1972 Penguin Modern Classics edition (3€) in a second hand bookstore in Göttingen (Germany).
I don’t know exactly how (well, now I remember: I was looking for a transparent background patch for xclock), but a while ago, in Göttingen I stumbled on a 3D file system browser, called XCruiser (you can get it with ‘sudo apt-get install xcruise’). It has not been maintaned for a long while, and it can’t even open the files you “travel”, so it is pretty useless, albeit amazing.
As you already know, I’m just in the middle of getting a thesis done. This means quite a lot of hand-written papers, full of definitions and on top of it all a lot of notational problems. I have quite a few similarly named spaces, with its corresponding norms… It is a mess.
When I had already proved my “first” theorem (in the thesis context, I mean… I have a paper soon to be published :), I started LaTeXing it.
Image from Flickr
Arrow’s impossibility theorem and related results
Background: Let K={A,B,C…} be a finite set of alternatives (maybe political parties), with more than 3 items. Let’s call transitive preference a way to sort all these elements, with draws possible. It’s just a funny name for a vote, in the more general sense as we can split our vote (Let A have 0.5, B 0.25 and C 0.25 of our vote).
Around 1/2lf of the moments in which I look at my headphones to put them in, I pick them “switched”, i.e. I have (L)eft, I see an L and my head says (L)ight, then I see the other one, and it is (R)eft. Today I found out (R)eft is the past participle of reave, which means more or less “to rob”. But usually, in the presence of (R)ight there is nothing (L)eft.
My chair, my fractals (A4) and my Drazen
Petrovic poster (4xA4)
Rasterbator is an online poster maker, for you to print in your own printer. Of course, the results are not as good as full quality posters like these, but they look pretty good when looked from afar. It rasterises an image you upload (or link from anywhere in Internet), does some magic stuff, and the result is a bunch (you decide graphically how many, orientation and other options) of A4 (or Legal) sheets arranged in a nice PDF, which you have to print.
I have finally finished (duh!) reading a book on shorthand (stenography) focused on the catalan language. It is a book by Josep Cormand, “Estudi de fonologia bàsica : Mètode d’escriptura ràpida”, ISBN 84-218-0320-4. It is based in a method developed by professor Dalmau, based on catalan fonology. Once you are able to write in this way, you enjoy it more and more, is quite an interesting feeling. Although I find re-reading what I wrote a pain… I have written a lot more than read, thus I am still far from being proficient at it.
Today I read through Slashdot an article from the NY Times, where they show a correlation between number of good-level research articles and consumption of beer in the Czech Republic. More beer, less articles. It is still unclear if just bad (czech) scientists drown their sorrows in beer (not all of them, of course), and there are also a lot of counterexamples. Just a bizarre article.
This made me think of a former article I read there, talking about student-advisor (as a side note, adviser and advisor are both accepted in English, amazing) problems.
Tag: blog
A D3 sitemap using force layout and a web worker. This will come to bear-note-graph at some point (and other projects)
If you’ve been in this blog before, you may wonder if it looks different or is just your imagination. Fear not! You are not going crazy, this blag has changed.
A few days ago I found myself with a problem. I wanted a reddit button in one of our websites, and our technical guy wanted it to be asynchronous. After a little poking around and deciding that reddit doesn’t offer asynchronous buttons, I rolled my poor man’s version: wrap it in a $(document).ready() It’s not asynchronous, but at least it won’t block page loading.
Both happy, we deployed and I tested.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Using Gephi with Google Analytics to visualize keywords and landing pages
6 minutes read | 1087 words
As of late, I’ve been playing a lot with data analysis and visualization tools. Recently I’ve read two interesting books (Statistical Analysis with R and Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics and I’m on my way to another two to refresh my statistics knowledge.
But this post is only mildly related to these books, since it started way before: the day I read about Gephi. Gephi is an open source graph visualization tool, to work with huge (or at least big) datasets and graphs.
From morguefile
It’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.
But you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place.
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
Hi readers! (woah… 235 already! I’m so glad you’re here with me!)
This week I’m in Warsaw for a workshop (as I already commented in last post when I talked about the poster I am presenting).
I was expecting to use idle hours between talks and afternoons to write posts and post a little… But my internet connection is inexistent. This post is coming from an open wifi connection, which gets connected and disconnected at random, and when at its peak, just makes 3Kb/s.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought any app through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying any app and the review was unfaithful to the application.
Preface: I have been using Linux since around 1998, when I installed Debian from scratch in my old Pentium II. I am more end-user than power user, but the computer I use most often (my netbook) has Linux in it by default. Also, my office computer is a Linux computer. And I am writing this in my MacBook. Which is not Linux, but at least it is Unix. What comes now is a personal rant, after a fight with my netbook.
I just want to introduce you Fatou, our little cat.
I like napping in the sofa
We adopted him last Saturday, and he is 2 months old. He is named after French mathematician Pierre Fatou… Mostly because Laia didn’t want him to be named Kolmogorov, and Fatou was the first mathematician name she liked.
He is very cute (as you can see), and well-mannered. Last Monday he had to go to the veterinary clinic for a revision, and the vet told us it is amazing how good he is: he even wears his collar!
While I was in Iceland, I started to see visits coming to my blog from www.hanselminutes.com… A site I didn’t know about. As soon as I got a decent wifi coverage I went to see what it was about… And it was a podcast!
From his own description,
Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.
Today I am leaving on holiday… Destination: Iceland. It is funny, because we arranged everything (accomodation, car rental and such) just two weeks before Eyjafjallajökull started spitting ash. It have been a few months wondering whether we could make it to Iceland and come back… Fortunately the little volcano took a pause and here we go.
I have a few scheduled posts for this few weeks (I’ll be back around 16th July) but I will be again posting more frequently after I am back.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
My backlog of things happening is quickly filling, faster than I can even keep track of it. Just a quick overview
Summer trip to Iceland This summer we are going to Iceland for 17 days. It is some kind of tour-trip, where we have arranged accomodation and car rental and we just have to keep en route around the island to sleep where arranged each day. As an addition to this…
It had to happen sooner or later. This blog has been open, with a somewhat regular publication in English since March 2008, more or less a year ago. Before that, it was more sporadic, and used to be in Catalan, just to output some ideas or share a picture with a friend.
And the day had to come. To celebrate this approximate anniversary, I’m moving to my own domain and preparing a new look that will appear in about two weeks.
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
CicleImatges()
Source code:
// Copyright 2009 Rubén Berenguel
// ruben /at/ maia /dot/ ub /dot/ es
// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
// published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of
// the License, or (at your option) any later version.
// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
After trying different methods to add “Digg this”, “Stumble this!” and similar buttons, I’ve decided that MyFolia’s approach is the best.
This neat bookmarks appear in the far bottom of every post, and allow to bookmark the current post in any of these websites (Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Facebook, technorati, Google and StumbleUpon). With autocompletion of the url and title, sure.
To add this code to your blogger blog:
Go to layout settings, and select edit HTML
This blog was started on this day, and was written in Catalan until mid-2007. On August 22nd, 2019 I moved from Blogger, my original blogging platform to GitHub pages. Since the readership has shifted to English speakers and the interest of the early posts is low (also, I had to port the posts to another format…) I deleted a great deal (around 350, out of the 670 I had at migration time) of the earliest posts.
Tag: books
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
Sun Tzu
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
Down into some net rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a review of Work Clean. I chuckled: a productivity book, philosophizing about how cook’s approach to preparation (mise en place) would fix all our problems? Bring it on, I have a long commute.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Santa brought me the gift I wanted for Christmas: a pyrograph. In case you don’t know, a pyrograph is a tool to draw over wood, by burning it.
As you may already know, I love drawing (in particular, ink drawing). This is similar: you don’t have a lot of control over tone and a mistake can ruin the drawing.
This was the first time I used one, and to test how it worked I decided to draw a Celtic knot over a wooden box.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
A few weeks ago I realised that I didn’t have a printed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art
of
War,
and this thought collided head on with another old thought I had: could I use
pdfpages to create A6 booklets? I use it frequently to turn my papers into
handy A4 booklets (a few A4 folded in half), butI did not know if I could do it
another time to generate A5 booklets, or even another time to get a small and
nice A6 booklet
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought this book through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying the book and the review was unfaithful to the book.
A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
Most of you may not know who Vladimir Arnold (Владимир Арнольд, also written as Vladimir Arnol’d) was, but for me his death on 3rd June 2010,was some kind of landmark. I own two books by him (Mathematical aspects of classical and celestial mechanics [1] and Mathematical methods of classical mechanics [2]), and are quite high in my list of most checked books, at least when I was starting my journey into the realm of dynamical systems.
The 23rd of April is a very special day in Catalonia. The legend of Saint George, in the Catalan version happens in a small town called Montblanc, and when the knight kills the Dragon from its spilled blood grows a red rose he gave to the princess. Since medieval times, men give their a rose to his significant other, and in 1923 something was added to this story.
A bookseller wanted to spice the celebration, and as Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on this same day, he promoted the giving of books as a present.
Below you can find a non exhaustive list of the best programming books I have read so far. I have read a lot more books about programming, but most of them I read and promptly forgot about them. I am reading currently a few more (Code Complete, Thinking Forth), and maybe they can make it into a list like this that my future self writes.
And now, the list of the best programming books I have read so far.
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
I love the smell of old (really old, but not dusty) books. It reminds me of some kind of vanilla scent, that is only to be found in them. I smelled it a few weeks ago, when I bought Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, second hand 1972 Penguin Modern Classics edition (3€) in a second hand bookstore in Göttingen (Germany).
Softcover binding your own books is easier than you think
Bookbinding for dummies As of late, I have been printing quite a lot of long mathematical papers, and a few free pdf-books, or tutorials. And I wanted them properly bound, but didn’t want them so much as to pay for it. A few months ago, I found this tutorial on hardback binding. Although the tutorial, method and result are great, it is quite a lengthy effort.
This weekend I bought three books:
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (Bill Evans: Vida y Obra), Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (Crónicas Marcianas) and The Lebanese Cookbook (a spanish edition). I have already finished Bradbury’s, I enjoyed it a lot. A masterpiece in science-fiction. In one of its short stories there is a poem by Lord Byron:
So we’ll go no more a roving
so late into the night
Tag: business
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Tag: c
A few days go I played a bit with a naive implementation of Bloom
filters in Python. I wanted to time
them against just checking whether a field is in a set/collection. I found
something slightly puzzling: it looked like the in worked too fast for
smaller lists. And I wondered: maybe small lists are special internally, and
allow for really fast lookups? Maybe they have some internal index? This raised
the question: how does in find stuff in sequences?
A LISP random triangle generator. Also wrote a C version.
Tag: cassandra
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
Tag: christmas
The year has ended, what has been going on?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
Two context-free grammars for a Merry Christmas. Rendered with Context Free
Tag: coffee
Thermometers are already hitting 29°C with temperature feelings around 32 or 33. It’s this time of the year when I need cold drinks to keep me alive. I’m not a big soda fan (except when I’m on Finland in the Nordic Go Academy camp, they are so stocked on soda that I’m dragged in,) so my go-to drink is usually freshly squeezed lemonade with some ice cubes and sometimes a pinch of soda to make it fizz (and make it less acid.
Maybe the best coffee time cookies?
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Snickerdoodles are probably the best coffee time cookies I have eaten, and also one of the simplest cookie recipes to do. What you’ll need:
125 gr butter
110 gr sugar (+ 1 big spoon later)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or change some sugar for vanillated sugar)
250 gr flour
A month or so ago I went to Cafes El Magnífico (sadly doesn’t work with Firefox), a nice coffee dealer near the cathedral to buy me some good coffee. Cristina wanted also some tea, and in front of C.E.M there is Sans & Sans Fine Tea, so it is the perfect place for us. I bought 250g of coffee from Java, an island in Indonesia. They told me it is good with milk and also alone, and indeed it is.
Tag: command-line
Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
Note: It’s best to open the videos in full screen. Also I have added a few line breaks or readability in the code snippets that will make them not work correctly. It’s not hard to find where they are, if you run into any problems let me know.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been using Acme and related Plan 9 from User Space utilities lately. One of its pieces is the plumber.
Yes, you can! Adding colors to terminal output is possible. You already know it, from ls –color In this post I show you a script that does it, in a simple way. I don’t have a full range of colors implemented, but you can find all here.
This is the sed-processed output given by Gcal. The original source looks like
As you can see, I used as identifiers XML-like expressions.
The Ben NanoNote has very few applications, as of now. And one it has (among a few nice others), is Gcal. I didn’t know what Gcal was, and the Qi hardware wiki page on Gcal pointed me to this quite nice tutorial: The many uses of Gcal.
The tutorial is quite good, but somewhat long, and lacks a few specific examples, so I decided to write just what I read in that tutorial, mixed with the uses I am putting it to, so it is more a Gcal use cases than a full blown tutorial like that.
Tag: cooking
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
Heavy focus on Python’s asyncio this week. Also, one of the best books of the
year.
A few days ago I found this recipe via StumbleUpon. I had two apples I would not eat, and decided to give it a go. But I didn’t have oatmeal, so I improvised. This is my version, which I call Crispy Apple Pie.
If you have ever been to Denmark, they eat something named Æblekage. I ate it last November, and I loved it. This is very, very similar… with a little whipped cream it would be almost the same.
I bet you have felt like this some day: You just prepared a soup, one of those soups in need of crumbs of bread. Or you prepared a nice meal, asking for bread to dump in the sauce. And you have no bread at home! Not a single piece of bread.
This is the answer
Although this looks like a all-free / no taste cake, it is wonderful. And of course, at it is gluten, dairy and egg free, almost everyone can eat it. What you will need:
1 measure soy yogurt 1 measure dark brown sugar (we used Tate&Lyle Dark Brown Sugar) 1 measure gluten-free flour 1/4 measure oil 1 teaspoon baking powder Here measure depends on how much iogurt do you have.
Maybe the best coffee time cookies?
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Snickerdoodles are probably the best coffee time cookies I have eaten, and also one of the simplest cookie recipes to do. What you’ll need:
125 gr butter
110 gr sugar (+ 1 big spoon later)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or change some sugar for vanillated sugar)
250 gr flour
2 or 3 fillets of marinated herring with onion (typical scandinavian) 3 marinated cucumber, polish (sweet) style 1 Golden (yellow and somewhat sweet, not acid) apple 3 boiled potatos, diced 1 1/2 cups mayonnaise Optional: a little mustard Slice finely the cucumber, cut the apple in dices and the fillets in small pieces. Mix the mustard, mayonnaise, a little vinegar from the herring and then add the fish, mix well.
Does not like like that, but tastes great!
2 ripe avocados
1/2 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons vanilla (or vanillated sugar)
3/4 cup agave syrup (or sugar syrup)
1/2 cup lime juice
1/8 tablespoon salt
3/4 cup coconut butter (or coconut oil)
pie crust (below a recipe for it)
Mix all the ingredients (except the pie crust) in a blender.
Pasteli
The Greek home-made energy bar
Ingredients (yields around 500 gr, can be scaled down or up):
250 gr honey
250 gr sesame seed, shredded pistachios and almond (I used: 50 gr shredded pistachios, 70 gr shredded almond and125 gr sesame seed)
Peel of half a lemon (optional)
Cinnamon (optional)
Some place to put it all on (A mould with parchment paper is perfect)
This is a recipe my grandfather used to make for me (and my cousins) when I was a child. Hopeyou like it as much as I liked it, and enjoy making fun figures and then eating them.
What you will need
3 eggs,
3 tablespoons of olive oil,
3 tablespoons of sugar,
grated lemon skin (clean it before grating), or something to add flavour,
Name one great asset to your cupboard. One you can put in a pizza, in almost every salad, you can make omelets out of it, can put over a toast and could be a side dish to almost every meal you can think of. Well, sun dried tomatoes come close to it. Tasty, nice and they smell as good you get hungry just opening the jar. Well, they are really easy to do at home, with just your oven!
Tag: css
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
Tag: d3
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Tag: d3js
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
The last of 2020.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
A D3 sitemap using force layout and a web worker. This will come to bear-note-graph at some point (and other projects)
Tag: data
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
A new entry on the data papers series. Ray is a distributed framework for next generation AI applications. What does this mean? A scam? Blockchain on AI? Nah, it’s actually pretty cool, it has actors.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
It has been a while since my previous data paper. This time I tackle a less known one.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
This turned out a long one
Trust between business stakeholders and engineering (and data, analytics, operations…) teams is a tricky matter.
Meetings galore.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
The dbt issue
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
Happy new year!
Christmas edition!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model, with change over time.
An unusual collection of links.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
Days of fire Kafka and thunder SSL.
This Apache Spark feature has made us scratch our heads way too much.
I had a very entertaining week.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
Next week I start a new job 😮
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model.
I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian. I may write the reasons at some point, stay 🐟.
Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
Hive is arguably old. It is also undoubtedly useful, even now: 10 years after it was introduced.
The video edition
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
Managing logging in Spark ain’t easy, and is even harder in managed clouds like Databricks or EMR.
Finishing and posting this got lost in a task manager reorganisation, it was due in June-July.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
A relatively common type of query for time-based SQL tables is a find the gap query. How can you do this in AWS Redshift, which does not have the SQL function generate_series?
This is a short edition.
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
This is the next instalment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers in the data space.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
After reading the Snowflake paper, I got curious about how similar engines work. Also, as I mentioned in that article, I like knowing how the data sausage is made. So, here I will summarise the Delta Lake paper by Databricks.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
The one where Airflow messes with you.
I didn’t know much about Snowflake, so I decided to have a look at its SIGMOD (ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data) paper and investigate a bit more what special capabilities they offer, and how they compare to others.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.
At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year
Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.
Started a long time ago. It was supposed to be about a phenomenon leading to chaos: separatrix splitting. I got a research grant. I worked on holomorphic dynamics. Travelled. Presented. Too many roadblocks with the separatrix problem. Switched topics. Welcome to a different new world, infinite dimensional dynamical systems. I read the literature. Researched, proved some things. My grant ran out. I worked. A lot. Too many times I considered giving up.
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
Using Gephi with Google Analytics to visualize keywords and landing pages
6 minutes read | 1087 words
As of late, I’ve been playing a lot with data analysis and visualization tools. Recently I’ve read two interesting books (Statistical Analysis with R and Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics and I’m on my way to another two to refresh my statistics knowledge.
But this post is only mildly related to these books, since it started way before: the day I read about Gephi. Gephi is an open source graph visualization tool, to work with huge (or at least big) datasets and graphs.
Tag: data-engineering
Back on track.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
I have been working on several personal projects lately. Basically scratching projects itching on my to do lists for several months. This is the first write up from them: templating without base repositories.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with 400+ articles. I “trimmed” it down to “only” 380 during this week, I had a lot of airport time due to going to Spark Summit Europe to give a talk.
Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random bits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this week, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.
Tag: data-papers
A new entry on the data papers series. Ray is a distributed framework for next generation AI applications. What does this mean? A scam? Blockchain on AI? Nah, it’s actually pretty cool, it has actors.
It has been a while since my previous data paper. This time I tackle a less known one.
Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.
Hive is arguably old. It is also undoubtedly useful, even now: 10 years after it was introduced.
This is the next instalment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers in the data space.
After reading the Snowflake paper, I got curious about how similar engines work. Also, as I mentioned in that article, I like knowing how the data sausage is made. So, here I will summarise the Delta Lake paper by Databricks.
I didn’t know much about Snowflake, so I decided to have a look at its SIGMOD (ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data) paper and investigate a bit more what special capabilities they offer, and how they compare to others.
Tag: data-science
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Tag: database-internals
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
Tag: databases
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
Tag: databricks
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.
Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.
Managing logging in Spark ain’t easy, and is even harder in managed clouds like Databricks or EMR.
This is the next instalment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers in the data space.
After reading the Snowflake paper, I got curious about how similar engines work. Also, as I mentioned in that article, I like knowing how the data sausage is made. So, here I will summarise the Delta Lake paper by Databricks.
The one where Airflow messes with you.
Tag: dbt
This turned out a long one
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
The dbt issue
Happy new year!
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
Tag: devops
An unusual collection of links.
Tag: distributed-work
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
Tag: diy
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
The free iPod stand
Right: middle line, left top line
In this post I will explain how to recycle an old credit card to build a stand for your iPod touch / iPhone. You can choose from 3 designs, depending on your preferred inclination.
Here is what you will need:
A printed version of the shape. Scroll down for the jpg’d version A card Scissors Something to write A small file
Softcover binding your own books is easier than you think
Bookbinding for dummies As of late, I have been printing quite a lot of long mathematical papers, and a few free pdf-books, or tutorials. And I wanted them properly bound, but didn’t want them so much as to pay for it. A few months ago, I found this tutorial on hardback binding. Although the tutorial, method and result are great, it is quite a lengthy effort.
Tag: django
Note from 2020: The domain mentioned in the post is no longer active (or mine at least), I cancelled this project some time ago
Last week I wrote about ~whatlanguageis.com~, my first simple try at creating a Django powered site. How did it came to be?
In the last few months have been writing and thinking about several ideas to process social data with Python, undoubtedly motivated by the great book Mining the Social Web.
Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it… But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search.
Tag: docker
An unusual collection of links.
Change the parameters of a docker container without knowing the docker run command used
3 minutes read | 466 words
I’m not sure how useful this Docker “trick” is, since it happens in a very niche situation.
At work, we have several instances running a suite of Docker containers, with some non-trivial amount of environment variables, port configurations, volumes and links among them. This is set up really easily using ansible: writing link/port/volume mappings in ansible (using the docker, container or docker-container modules, depending how long ago we set it up).
Tag: documentation
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
Tag: downloads
This was computed using PVM and the full PDF generated is 16k pixels wide
Today is Iceland’s National Day (commemorating their independence day and the date of birth of Jón Sigurðsson), and to commemorate it I share this image with everyone.
I computed this image a long, long time ago (using the Distance Estimator Method, paralellised with PVM using 16 computers, it took just 2 minutes). The full file is a 30MB pdf, which I printed large-size (2 meters wide), and sits in my office.
This is a picture I shot in Iceland, in the Dynjandi Waterfall. If a caption is needed, it would be Never give up. Click the thumbnails to download the high resolution images.
Dynjandi Waterfalls
I have not set any download tracking, thus I don’t know if you are downloading these: Please, if you download one of these wallpapers, please leave a comment in the form below!
If you like this wallpaper, please share in StumbleUpon or Twitter.
As I already did with Douady Rabbits, here is another dynamical plane, this time corresponding to a Siegel disk in an entire transcendental family in a parameter corresponding to a polynomial-like region.
Siegel disk in an ETF, available below as wallpaper
Siegel disk for desktop background 1280x800
Siegel disk for desktop background 1024x768
You can also buy a poster version here.
If you liked it, or have whatever else to say please leave a comment, digg, stumble or whatever you feel like doing.
I have been experimenting with exponential-power potentials in my fractal images as of late, and by far the best results have been these. You can download it as a desktop wallpaper, hope you enjoy it. This Douady rabbit appears as a capture zone for a critical value in an exponential family.
Douady rabbit in an exponential family, available below as wallpaper
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1280x800
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1024x768
Tag: drawing
Happy new year!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Thermometers are already hitting 29°C with temperature feelings around 32 or 33. It’s this time of the year when I need cold drinks to keep me alive. I’m not a big soda fan (except when I’m on Finland in the Nordic Go Academy camp, they are so stocked on soda that I’m dragged in,) so my go-to drink is usually freshly squeezed lemonade with some ice cubes and sometimes a pinch of soda to make it fizz (and make it less acid.
Yesterday I did nothing. Absolutely, really nothing.
And it felt great. Before yesterday, my usual weekend was filled of what I thought was doing nothing, but far from it. I wrote posts, programmed, read a lot online and caught up with what was going in the A-List Blogger Club forum. Did some laundry, folded the clothes. All this (well, except for the laundry part) under the assumption that doing what you love does not tire you.
Today I am leaving on holiday… Destination: Iceland. It is funny, because we arranged everything (accomodation, car rental and such) just two weeks before Eyjafjallajökull started spitting ash. It have been a few months wondering whether we could make it to Iceland and come back… Fortunately the little volcano took a pause and here we go.
I have a few scheduled posts for this few weeks (I’ll be back around 16th July) but I will be again posting more frequently after I am back.
- Mr(s) Red Square is doomed to donate
Made with Sketchbook Mobile…
in an iPod Touch
All hail hypnotoad… in real life
I want to start by saying that I might buy an iPad, and definitely like it, in an abstract setting. But I think that Steve Jobs is kind of blind through his own charisma. He likes the iPad… then it should be liked (and bought) by everyone.
I don’t think the iPad is gona be a hit.
I got this bookfor Christmas (more or less), and started to read and draw from it a few days ago. It is amazing what small hints can do to a messy drawing. The barrel, in particular, started as a messy outline (from the barrel in the book) and the final result looks pretty convincing (for me, at least).
First drawing
Second drawing
Third drawing
Fourth drawing
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
With Sketchbook Mobile
The concepts of “future”, “job stability” or even “location” are quite fuzzy when in Mathematics. I think I don’t know any PhD student who knows what he will be doing in 3 years, what he will be working on (not what he will be researching, but working…) or even where he will be.
1-2 years of Master+Master thesis
2-6 years of PhD thesis (3-4 years PhD grant+maybe some associated professor, 1-4 years)
My chair, my fractals (A4) and my Drazen
Petrovic poster (4xA4)
Rasterbator is an online poster maker, for you to print in your own printer. Of course, the results are not as good as full quality posters like these, but they look pretty good when looked from afar. It rasterises an image you upload (or link from anywhere in Internet), does some magic stuff, and the result is a bunch (you decide graphically how many, orientation and other options) of A4 (or Legal) sheets arranged in a nice PDF, which you have to print.
As you may already know, I enjoy a lot drawing. I usually draw with some kind of mechanical pencil, of HB strength (or one for film writing which is stronger than 3H). As I try to improve the quality of my drawings, I begin to wonder if I really like to draw really well. Yes, I’d like to be able to draw perfect faces, but probably I’ll be as happy being able to sketch a face that looks like the original one.
Tag: duckdb
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
Tag: emacs
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package.
As you may know, I’m a heavy emacs user, and a frequent Scala developer. Scala tooling for emacs was restricted to mostly ensime until recently. Although ensime is an excellent piece of software, it made my old Macbook suffer a lot (it only had 8gb of RAM). So, most of the time I just went hardcore mode developer, and worked with no autocompletion, no jump to definition, no-nothing. A pervasive use of ripgrep and good memory were sometimes enough, but I was envious of many things I could see in my colleagues using IntelliJ. Of course, switching editors was not an option.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays)
3 minutes read | 472 words
At Affectv we use a wide range of editors: Sublime, Atom, Emacs, Pycharm, IntelliJ… Actually only two people use the same editor! As such, from time to time I see things in other people’s editors that I would like to have as well. So, yesterday I decided to improve on some configuration settings on Spacemacs.
Click for multiple-cursors I saw this on Jordi’s Sublime, and it is much more comfortable than using more-like-this or similar helper functions, even if I need to use the trackpad to do so.
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing.
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
Text editors. You hate them or love them. Praise them with religious zeal, and attack them with the same power. I’ve been an emacs user for the last 8 years, getting as deep as I could without checking the source. And the past few months I have started using evil-mode in emacs, to get some taste of vim in my daily editing (mostly text objects.)
There’s still a third contestant in editor-land, for me.
The links to Practical Vim are affiliate links to Amazon. Beware!
So… last January I was in a flight to London, preparing for an intense, 12 days course on traditional shoemaking (English hand-welted shoes, improving our knowledge at The Fancy Puffin.) And my flight read was Practical Vim. Most of my readers are already aware I’m an emacs guy, so the main question is why?
I love knowing many tools.
Version Control: Started using git and github (and how to set-up a remote git server)
2 minutes read | 363 words
It’s been almost 6 years since I used some kind of version control system. Back then I wasn’t sure about which I wanted to use… I settled with RCS, the father of them all. RCS was structurally simple, with text-based (human-readable) delta files. I liked that. I had all my code and TeX files under revision control, but then I started using more than one computer and it got out of hand quickly (using RCS or CVS in Windows was quite tricky and had user and encoding problems.)
Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Image copyrighted by Lucent Technologies, hosted by Wikimedia Commons and posted here for information purposes
A few months ago I wrote about how I’m using vim in my ipad. You know, I’m an emacs guy, just started writing my own (useful) stuff to improve it. Recently I finished gnusnotes.el, a package which allows you to easily add notes to emails. Of course, before this I had already written emacs code, just that it was only for me.
Sensitive information blanked
The gnusnotes.el package, with delete and edit capabilities is now available in the marmalade package repository. This post just explains why, how and what (code at the end, too)
Last month I switched email clients (for the 4th time in the past year.) I’ve passed through gnus, Thunderbird, mail.app and settled with Sparrow. Just 2 days before Sparrow was bought by Google I left for gnus (lucky moment!
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
I’ve been thinking about getting a new Macbook lately (my heart and wallet were divided among a 11" Air or a 15" Retina Pro). My 4-year old Macbook (Early 2008 I think, 2 GB Ram, Intel Core Duo 2.4 GHz) was showing its age. Mainly when I had the RAM and cache hungry inhabitants of my dock active: Yorufukurou (the best twitter client for managing multiple accounts in a Mac I’ve seen) and Sparrow (mail client).
Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Using Taskwarrior Instead Of Emacs+Org Mode For To-Do And Appointment Tracking
6 minutes read | 1189 words
One of my fractal images
I have a confession to make: I’m not using emacs+org mode to keep my to-do list and appointments. What? The same emacs junkie that used emacs for (almost) everything last December gave up emacs? Yes, the same, but only gave up for this use case. I have some good reasons about why I am using TaskWarrior. Which does not mean that I could not be using emacs for the same, I just wanted to try something new.
The gnus logo,
from gnus homepage
Ever since my first post of the emacs 30 Day Challenge, I was warned about gnus slowness. A lot of comments in reddit pointed to this, and suggested using wanderlust or installing a local IMAP server (like dovecot or notmuch) to speed up the IMAP back-end (search, retrieval and processing), while also allowing for offline reading.
The main drawback was keeping it nicely cross-platform.
Keep your contacts
under control
Bbdb stands for The Insidious Big Brother Database, and is a very powerful contact book for emacs. It holds names, emails, aliases and other information and has good integration with gnus, wanderlust and vm (view mail). In my case, I have only checked gnus integration which is indeed pretty good.
This is the third installment in the set of posts for the emacs 30 Day Challenge: doing everything (as far as possible) from within emacs.
The gnus logo,
from gnus homepage
When the time to choose a mail reader for emacs came, as part of my emacs 30 Day Challenge, there were not really a lot of options. A long, long time ago I had tried vm (view mail) with no luck. I don’t remember the details (it was something like 3 years ago), but the results where unappealing. The only contenders where gnus and wanderlust.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
You can check the challenge updates below:
The easiest way to debug: valgrind with the most powerful text editor: emacs A few days ago my office mate told me about the great debugging tool known as valgrind. Before I have been using the great pairing of emacs+gdb to debug segmentation faults and memory leaks… Now I would never use gdb for this. Moreover, I found a way to somewhat use it from within a shell in emacs to allow fast error browsing.
I got linked to Ipad’s “history”: Someone on MetaFilter posted a link to my emacs on iPod blog post in the thread about the launch of Apple’s iPad.
You may also like
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Linux,iPod,Mac,emacs)),5)
Using emacs on the go in your iPod Touch / iPhone Maybe you remember a previous post on installing vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for the iPod Touch. I did it just for the geek factor… and for being able to edit things with Emacs. I have emacs installed:
But what’s the use of emacs, without files to edit? It didn’t bother me… at first. Keep on reading for how to keep in sync files edited inside the vMac emacs and files in your Linux box, along with the “why should I use emacs in my iPod/iPhone?
With GIMP’s “Map to sphere”
A few years ago, while I was still mainly a Windows user, I read ‘Pragmatic programmer: From journeyman to master’, and learnt about Version Control Systems. You know, SVN, CVS, Git, Darcs. As I was just a single user working locally (just wanted the incremental and logged backups), I installed RCS. Almost the oldest, and in some sense the most simple. It can work locally, just with a file of delta (text added from one revision to the next) which is a plain text, human readable file.
A few days ago I jailbroke my iPod touch. Just for the geek factor, first, as I thought I could get a C compiler on it. I can’t yet, so I just have it jailbreaken for a few applications. I’ll start my review for a long time loved application in Linux and Mac: Mini vMac.Mini vMac is a hardware emulator, which emulates a whole Mac Plus from the eighties. You just need a real Mac ROM, from a Mac you or someone you know owns.
From The Design of the Emacs Logo
I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. I even use it in my iPod touch, through minivMac. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.
Emacs fun, in other words. This weekend I’m writing some programs in C, to review major problems before my students ask. Yesterday I finished the part due Wednesday (for them), and today I tackled the final part. But there is some bug somewhere… I always miss on such matrix-here-matrix-there-solve-that.
Today, after battling for an hour, I realized I missed the “intellisense” part of CEDET, and started to install it here in MacOs, and “there” in my netbook.
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
For a while I have been either not LaTeXing a lot, or not using AucTeX frequently. Strange indeed! But in July, while in Göttingen I wrote part of some lecture notes of one of the courses. And again, used auctex-preview in emacs to find errors in what I was writing.
I can’t even tell how wonderful it is, to share the source with the images with the formulas. An image is worth more than a googol words.
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Two and a half weeks ago, I got a netbook and promptly installed Ubuntu, followed by Fluxbox (as already explained). And after two weeks of almost continued use, I like it even more than when I decided to use it. Some of the points I really enjoy (in no particular order).
Strong keyboard shortcuts. As an emacs junkie as I am, I love keyboard shortcuts. And Fluxbox is incredibly flexible in defining or removing them: Even system-wide shortcuts are customizable.
Last monday I bought an Acer Aspire One, 8.9', with an extra 6-cell battery and 15 minutes later I installed Ubuntu (Netbook Remix version) on it, and after realizing everything was working smoothly (except for the SD card reader… anyway, I have an external device for doing so) I installed the Fluxbox window manager. New: You may also be interested in Two weeks: still loving Fluxbox.
Here you can see the FluxBox Root menu, Conky in the “desktop”
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
I have been using several productivy enhancers (or time-wasting avoiders) as of late. Although I find them quite useful, I wonder if I could find something even better.
Think: I have already talked about think elsewhere. Think enables the user to focus on just one application, seeing nothing more. It is like the blinders of a horse to keep you from distracting.
LeechBlock: A FireFox addon, which allows you to block certain sites at certain times of the week, or after a predetermined amount of time has been wasted there.
There are a few Mac applications I use so often, I couldn’t live without them. And most of them are free, or really kind shareware.
Caffeine: Keep your Mac from sleeping.
Carbon Emacs (F): Well, this is cross-platform. And you know, I can’t live without it. Plus, Carbon Emacs has some nifty additions. Check it out!
Disk Inventory X (F): Shows graphically the size of files sitting in your drives.
I “discovered” Nethack a month or so ago, while being bored to death (after three unsuccessful attempts in proving something) in my office.
Myself with my dog Hachi
I play the MacOs Tiles (or QT) version, which can be found in Nethack.org, configured for ASCII color play. The configuration file is a file called .nethackrc in your home directory, mine looks like:
OPTIONS=!autopickup,ascii_map, color, hilite_pet, lit_corridor, showexp, showscore, boulder:0;
If you are printing a lot of… well, anything, sure you would love to make booklets out of what you print. If you happen to be a mathematician, you sure are printing lots of papers with more than 20 pages, which turn to 10 unmanageable pages when double-sided. But making a booklet allows you to turn them to just a little folded thing that you can read easier.
When printing in MacOSX you can print booklets, but they are supposed to be cut, not folded across as you would do to bind a book.
Tag: engineering
Trust between business stakeholders and engineering (and data, analytics, operations…) teams is a tricky matter.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
Tag: essay
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Tag: essays
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.
In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages.
Tag: formal-methods
Happy new year!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model, with change over time.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
Tag: forth
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Today, while I was thinking of the best implementation solution for the vector operations, I realised that I am just not motivated by writing a raytracer in Forth. I’ll have to find something more interesting, or at least, more Forth minded to work on.
If I want to raytrace, better to improve the Lisp raytracer, which is sitting idly in my Code/Lisp folder. Steps that will follow in the raytracer path:
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m on my way to learn forth, and to do so, rewrite my Lispy raytracer into a.. Forthy raytracer. Of course, the first steps are deciding on some implementation ideas.
I decided to allocate a few global variables (for “current point”, “current vector”, “light source”, etc), to avoid too much clutter in the stack. This way it will be cleaner, maybe even cleaner than my Lisp version.
After following a twitter feed about programming, I got overwhelmed by FORTH related posts. I had already read something about forth before (stack-based, somewhat fast, good for embedded devices), but so many bit.ly links pointing to webs of implementations of FORTH and FORTH things made me decide to, well, take a deeper look.
Looks like a nice language, having something I enjoy about Lisp (interactivity) and something I like about PostScript (stack based).
Tag: fractals
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
A few weeks ago I started trying a pre-beta release of Dyalog APL (now available as “full beta”) for Mac. Fellow Mac users, looks like we are in for a treat after so much time of only having GNU APL and the pretty expensive APLX. Now Mac APL lovers, users and aficionados will have a competitive, commercial option. At last!
I started with the usual 1+1, ⍳ 10 , ⍴ ⍳ 10 to check it worked as expected.
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
This was computed using PVM and the full PDF generated is 16k pixels wide
Today is Iceland’s National Day (commemorating their independence day and the date of birth of Jón Sigurðsson), and to commemorate it I share this image with everyone.
I computed this image a long, long time ago (using the Distance Estimator Method, paralellised with PVM using 16 computers, it took just 2 minutes). The full file is a 30MB pdf, which I printed large-size (2 meters wide), and sits in my office.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
As you may remember, I spent quite some time this August with Lavaurs algorithm for the topological identification of the circle corresponding to the Mandelbrot set. After that, I spent quite some more trying to do pictures of external rays to show side by side. I was not able… and then found Mandel.
Thanks to Mandel, LISP and my Lavaurs code
Really nice program, with lots and lots of options (and I met the programmer, which happens to be also mathematician, we met at a conference).
As you may already know, I presented a poster at a conference recently, and did the set up with Scribus, the texts with LaTeX with the Beamer and Beamerposter packages.
Setting up
Note from 2019: I can’t find the final version of that poster, only a modified version from a few months later for another conference.
The first piece of advise, is to set page guides where needed (in the Page menu, you can put them at a certain numerical place, and then move them along) and then Snap to guides in the same menu.
Just 5 excerpts of it
Related posts:
And “e” appears from nowhere!9 programming books I have read and somewhat liked…
C code juicer: detecting copied programming assignments
Cron, diff & wget: Watch changes in a webpage
8 reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer
Approximating images with randomly placed translucent triangles
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Linux, Programming)),10)
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
As I already did with Douady Rabbits, here is another dynamical plane, this time corresponding to a Siegel disk in an entire transcendental family in a parameter corresponding to a polynomial-like region.
Siegel disk in an ETF, available below as wallpaper
Siegel disk for desktop background 1280x800
Siegel disk for desktop background 1024x768
You can also buy a poster version here.
If you liked it, or have whatever else to say please leave a comment, digg, stumble or whatever you feel like doing.
I have been experimenting with exponential-power potentials in my fractal images as of late, and by far the best results have been these. You can download it as a desktop wallpaper, hope you enjoy it. This Douady rabbit appears as a capture zone for a critical value in an exponential family.
Douady rabbit in an exponential family, available below as wallpaper
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1280x800
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1024x768
Tag: functional-programming
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Tag: games
The last of 2020.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
It would probably be an understatement to say I’m not a gamer. Last console I got was a Game Boy, 22 years ago (IIRC). Never got a gaming PC.
The links to Amazon and The Book Depository are affiliate links. If you purchase like 50 copies I may afford a coffee :D
From Flickr
It all started after reading If you can’t choose, pick at random at Aeon.co. It delves into how choosing at random can be best in some cases. Give it a read, it is interesting. Among the HackerNews comments about this submission there were some mentions about choosing at random in real life, and to the novel The Dice Man (Amazon | Book Depository).
I’ve been playing the game of Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) on and off for almost 10 years. In case you don’t know, Go is a board game with very old roots, that can be traced back to at least 2500 years ago, probably a lot more. Very popular in Japan (known as Go or Igo), Korea (baduk) and China (weiqi), it has been slowly spreading among the west during the last century.
Doesn’t it look nice?
Last week Laia and me went to a toy/book/stuff shop to buy a music stand. Practising guitar without a music stand was starting to feel rather odd. While we were there, we bought several more items, among them an old time favourite from myself: a mirror rubik cube. An addition to my keychain cube, SuperCube, 5x5 cube and Rubik dodecahedron. I had only seen it online, from Amazon.
This is a follow up of my previous post on Retro on iPod Touch. Previously I reviewed Mini vMac Apple Mac Plus emulator. This time also comes an emulator (sort of). ScummVM is self-described as a collection of game engine recreations, and is available for several platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux at least… also several handhelds and game consoles). For me, its main use is to replay old LucasArts graphical adventures.
Screenshots!
Back when I was in school, I had a really nice game in my 80286 computer, under Windows 3.1. Yes, it was 15 years ago… The game was Hyperoid, by Edward Hutchins. When I got my first Pentium with Windows 95, I longed that game… and the 3.1. version didn’t work completely OK in it. Anyway I played… then found Hyperoid95. I even recompiled it, to add firepower (the author of this version cut the fire speed).
I “discovered” Nethack a month or so ago, while being bored to death (after three unsuccessful attempts in proving something) in my office.
Myself with my dog Hachi
I play the MacOs Tiles (or QT) version, which can be found in Nethack.org, configured for ASCII color play. The configuration file is a file called .nethackrc in your home directory, mine looks like:
OPTIONS=!autopickup,ascii_map, color, hilite_pet, lit_corridor, showexp, showscore, boulder:0;
Tag: geek
A few months ago (woah, so long already) I had an impulse buy: I purchased a circular slide rule from Etsy. It was cheap, and I had always wanted one, so… I just bought it (a neat addition to my Addiator.)
I guess if you are geeky enough to read mostlymaths.net, you know how a slide rule works. Although I knew how to use it, getting to grips with it took a little while.
From Flickr
No, this is not a tutorial (but I do have written the standard steps to learn below). I began learning to juggle very recently. I just want to answer a possible “why”?
I’ve always been fascinated by juggling, and every time I wanted to eat more than 2 small oranges I’d try my hand at juggling them. Always followed by bowing and picking them from the ground, of course.
Tag: generative
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
Here are the details about how my procedural sketch Iris works. This has been one of the fastest and most enjoyable sketches I have created lately
A D3 sitemap using force layout and a web worker. This will come to bear-note-graph at some point (and other projects)
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
If you have been paying attention, you may have seen me talk about p5js and generative art lately. Here is a break-down of the why and how.
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
Some details of my p5js sketch Blot/Painting
Generative art using p5.js
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
Tag: github
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
A few days go I played a bit with a naive implementation of Bloom
filters in Python. I wanted to time
them against just checking whether a field is in a set/collection. I found
something slightly puzzling: it looked like the in worked too fast for
smaller lists. And I wondered: maybe small lists are special internally, and
allow for really fast lookups? Maybe they have some internal index? This raised
the question: how does in find stuff in sequences?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Note: It’s best to open the videos in full screen. Also I have added a few line breaks or readability in the code snippets that will make them not work correctly. It’s not hard to find where they are, if you run into any problems let me know.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been using Acme and related Plan 9 from User Space utilities lately. One of its pieces is the plumber.
Version Control: Started using git and github (and how to set-up a remote git server)
2 minutes read | 363 words
It’s been almost 6 years since I used some kind of version control system. Back then I wasn’t sure about which I wanted to use… I settled with RCS, the father of them all. RCS was structurally simple, with text-based (human-readable) delta files. I liked that. I had all my code and TeX files under revision control, but then I started using more than one computer and it got out of hand quickly (using RCS or CVS in Windows was quite tricky and had user and encoding problems.)
Tag: gnus
The links to Practical Vim are affiliate links to Amazon. Beware!
So… last January I was in a flight to London, preparing for an intense, 12 days course on traditional shoemaking (English hand-welted shoes, improving our knowledge at The Fancy Puffin.) And my flight read was Practical Vim. Most of my readers are already aware I’m an emacs guy, so the main question is why?
I love knowing many tools.
Sensitive information blanked
The gnusnotes.el package, with delete and edit capabilities is now available in the marmalade package repository. This post just explains why, how and what (code at the end, too)
Last month I switched email clients (for the 4th time in the past year.) I’ve passed through gnus, Thunderbird, mail.app and settled with Sparrow. Just 2 days before Sparrow was bought by Google I left for gnus (lucky moment!
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
I’ve been thinking about getting a new Macbook lately (my heart and wallet were divided among a 11" Air or a 15" Retina Pro). My 4-year old Macbook (Early 2008 I think, 2 GB Ram, Intel Core Duo 2.4 GHz) was showing its age. Mainly when I had the RAM and cache hungry inhabitants of my dock active: Yorufukurou (the best twitter client for managing multiple accounts in a Mac I’ve seen) and Sparrow (mail client).
Tag: go
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.
At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year
Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.
The links to Amazon and The Book Depository are affiliate links. If you purchase like 50 copies I may afford a coffee :D
From Flickr
It all started after reading If you can’t choose, pick at random at Aeon.co. It delves into how choosing at random can be best in some cases. Give it a read, it is interesting. Among the HackerNews comments about this submission there were some mentions about choosing at random in real life, and to the novel The Dice Man (Amazon | Book Depository).
I’ve been playing the game of Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) on and off for almost 10 years. In case you don’t know, Go is a board game with very old roots, that can be traced back to at least 2500 years ago, probably a lot more. Very popular in Japan (known as Go or Igo), Korea (baduk) and China (weiqi), it has been slowly spreading among the west during the last century.
Tag: golang
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Back on track.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
I had a very entertaining week.
So, you want to debug some Go in VS Code. And maybe setup some Docker containers with services before? How the hell do you configure that?
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Tag: gtd
This is how I handle the dreaded GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review when using Things 3.
Tag: haskell
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
Sweet, sweet holidays.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
The video edition
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
After my happy experience with Haskell rewriting the ticketiser from Python to Haskell, I moved next on my list of rewrites.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
This is a project recap on writing some non-super-trivial Haskell for the first time.
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random bits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this week, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Tag: history
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
Heavy focus on Python’s asyncio this week. Also, one of the best books of the
year.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Tag: hive
So, you want to debug some Go in VS Code. And maybe setup some Docker containers with services before? How the hell do you configure that?
Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.
Hive is arguably old. It is also undoubtedly useful, even now: 10 years after it was introduced.
Tag: how-to
Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things
Cortesía de Shanidar
Puedes leer la versión inglesa de este post aquí: Learn to remember everything: the memory palace method
En este post os voy a enseñar cómo recordar a la perfección una lista. No importa la longitud de la lista: puede ser tu lista de la compra de 10 artículos, o una lista con 50, 100 o incluso 1000 cosas. Y en un próximo post, cómo aplicar este método para aprender idiomas.
Caveat: some of the links appearing in this post are affiliate links to Amazon.com If you buy anything from them, I get a small commission. As always, I only link to stuff I like. If you want to support (ever so slightly) this blog, buy something. If you don’t want, don’t do it ;)
Lately I’ve been watching an interesting TV series. Sherlock, the modern version of Conan Doyle’s stories and novels.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.
I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?
An image can help your memory…
For how long?
This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.
In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
Last Tuesday I made the move. I ditched Ubuntu and installed Arch Linux in my Acer Aspire One. After my post Linux is a time killer (which attracted a lot of attention, and didn’t really carry the message I wanted) I got a lot of comments to think about. The two most suggested Linux distributions were Debian/unstable and Arch Linux. Well, maybe Arch Linux was not that talked about, but the following comment bought me out:
A few weeks ago I saw in my Google Analytics that someone came to this blog looking for “Origami iPhone case”. As I have a Origami CD case, and several posts on iPhone/iPod Touch games… it was a page hit. But I thought: if I can have a neat CD case, I can also design a neat origami case for an iPhone! Said and… done. It took a few tries (and a few days), as you can see below.
Yes, I know it: it is easy. But I will be doing a wipe and reinstall of my MacBook, and when I need to reinstall everything I want a place to check for the steps I did. I found almost all tips needed here.
The first step is checking for Mercurial (wikipedia) in your system. Open a terminal and type
hg version
If your terminal complains about command not found, you don’t have Mercurial installed.
Although this looks like a all-free / no taste cake, it is wonderful. And of course, at it is gluten, dairy and egg free, almost everyone can eat it. What you will need:
1 measure soy yogurt 1 measure dark brown sugar (we used Tate&Lyle Dark Brown Sugar) 1 measure gluten-free flour 1/4 measure oil 1 teaspoon baking powder Here measure depends on how much iogurt do you have.
With GIMP’s “Map to sphere”
A few years ago, while I was still mainly a Windows user, I read ‘Pragmatic programmer: From journeyman to master’, and learnt about Version Control Systems. You know, SVN, CVS, Git, Darcs. As I was just a single user working locally (just wanted the incremental and logged backups), I installed RCS. Almost the oldest, and in some sense the most simple. It can work locally, just with a file of delta (text added from one revision to the next) which is a plain text, human readable file.
After buying my iPod Touch and playing a little with it, I realised that battery life was a problem, with the WiFi always on. Thus, I was always bringing up Settins-WiFi and turning on and off. There was no easy and quick way to do it… Until I jailbroke it. I installed SBSettings, and its first use was that. Swipe the upper status bar, and the menu shown above appears.
The free iPod stand
Right: middle line, left top line
In this post I will explain how to recycle an old credit card to build a stand for your iPod touch / iPhone. You can choose from 3 designs, depending on your preferred inclination.
Here is what you will need:
A printed version of the shape. Scroll down for the jpg’d version A card Scissors Something to write A small file
CicleImatges()
Source code:
// Copyright 2009 Rubén Berenguel
// ruben /at/ maia /dot/ ub /dot/ es
// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
// published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of
// the License, or (at your option) any later version.
// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
There is a plain and easy way to download YouTube .flv videos (which you can watch with VLC Media Player, or in a Mac with Quicktime Player and additional plug-ins).
To do so, you need the Safari Web Browser (Mac or Windows). Go to your desired page hosting a Flash Video file, and select Activity in the Window menu. There you will find the files being downloaded in the web-page you are visiting… double click the bigger one (as usually flash videos are the biggest files in YouTube pages, if you can’t find such a big file, check for the .
My chair, my fractals (A4) and my Drazen
Petrovic poster (4xA4)
Rasterbator is an online poster maker, for you to print in your own printer. Of course, the results are not as good as full quality posters like these, but they look pretty good when looked from afar. It rasterises an image you upload (or link from anywhere in Internet), does some magic stuff, and the result is a bunch (you decide graphically how many, orientation and other options) of A4 (or Legal) sheets arranged in a nice PDF, which you have to print.
An English version of my diagrams for the origami flower-box Origami flower-box (Caja-Flor) diagrams, in English. Loosely based upon Kawasaki’s rose and a traditional japanese box. Click on the diagrams to get a bigger view of them. It appeared (Spanish version) on the Spanish Origami Association Bulletin, Second Volume, 2008. You can also take a look at my easy origami CD case.
It will look like this when finished, closed and opened.
A few years ago I was looking for an origami CD case. I found this site (which uses Tom Hull’s design). Although it is a quick and neat design for an origami case, I don’t like it, it feels like the CD is about to fall. So I tweaked for a while, and came up with this design. It takes a little longer to fold, but holds really firm, and looks nicer after.
Tag: iceland
Beware, in what follows I rant. All figures come from Wikipedia or similar and are expressed with many zeroes and also in written form to make clear what a billion may be.
If you are a regular reader of mostlymaths.net, you’ll be aware that I don’t write a lot about current subjects. In fact, I actively try not to write about what’s going on at the moment, one notable exception may be a post I wrote about Mesut Özil’s stellar debut in the 2010 World Cup.
In Back to the Future, Doc sets the clock in the DeLorean to a day 25 years in the future. Today (2010, 6th July) is that day.
Today was a really amazing day. It was very sunny, and we visited Ísafjörður, a city that stole our hearts.
Holmavík’s Witchcraft Museum, Reykjanes We started our day with breakfast and taking a quick picture of Drangsnes' Rock troll. It does not look like a troll for us, but anyway.
As you may remember, yesterday we were not happy with our guest house. And in addition to what we saw yesterday, today our breakfast was d––n late. When you are driving around a country trying to be on time everywhere, you wake up early and drive a lot. If your breakfast is late, you are bound to either go faster (not a good idea in Iceland) or get to places later.
Hólar’s church, if I’m not wrong
I’ve been procrastinating a lot with this post. Although it may not look like this from the pictures (or even the text), this was one of the worse days in our trip. Uneventful, visiting not-so-interesting places and with a lousy guest house at the end of the day. Let’s see if you find if interesting! If not, the next post will be, don’t worry.
From my cheap dictionary
I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.
I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo.
No more gas ahead
Leaving Mývatn was a little dull. We saw a pair of handcraft stores that looked really interesting… And they were closed until 11! No way we could spend so much time waiting. We fueled, bought vanillated skyr for the route and took the road to Dettifoss. This is one of those places where you definitely have to fuel, there is no other gas station in 130km.
The Myvatn area
This weeks post in the Iceland road trip series comes a little late: Saturday was a relaxation day, and Sunday I posted about how relaxing Saturday felt. As such, I didn’t put the time to typeset this post until Friday was looming! I think I got a little out of hand adding pictures to this post… But the Mývatn area is impressive and I wanted to show it here.
Geese in the East Fjords, Iceland
In the last 2 weeks I’ve had a big surge of visits and new subscribers, following the rise in HackerNews of my old post Timeboxing: You Will Work Like Never Before and of my newer post Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique. To put in situation, last July my girlfriend and me made a road trip around Iceland, and I wrote everything we did each day.
Happy World Water Day! Luckily the post due for today was a lot of water in it, iced water sparkling of thousand years old blue ice. This was supposed to be our puffin visit day… But schedules played badly on us and we could not make it. We just made another round of Jökulsárlón icebergs while collecting shoreside rocks.
Expat tales While we were having breakfast we saw another guest in the lovely guesthouse at Hofell… and he surprised us by asking if we were Catalans, in Catalan!
Svartifoss, Iceland
Today (i.e. this day in our trip) was Laia’s birthday, and one of our personal landmarks in this trip, as we visited our favourite places: Svartifoss, my special place and Jökulsárlón, a place Laia loves. We spent almost all day in these two places and driving around, but they are probably two of the most remarkable experiences of our road trip in Iceland.
Kirkjugolf and Skaftafell Today we managed to visit the church’s floor, the Kirkjugolf.
Dynjandi waterfall, Iceland
This is the journal of our road trip around Iceland, what we did each day as we circled the island through the Ring Road. This series of posts started on February 2011, and is so far ongoing, posting once a week from our annotations and pictures. Bookmark this page if you want to come back to see what’s new.
Road Trip Around Iceland, Day 1: Reykjavik - the city I’d like to live
After visiting the wonders of the Golden Circle, we kept driving eastward getting into the region of waterfalls and glaciers. The day began with 2000 Icelandic krónur of fuel, that for 1/4 of the tank. Expensive, but not as expensive as one may guess, from prices in Spain. It continued with the first sighting of lambs in the middle of the road… Get used to that, it is very common!
The Kerid crater. Don’t miss it!
This was the official first day. We did a quick packing and preparing in our room and headed downstairs. Breakfast time, and we were amused to find a bunch of Spanish hiking tourists, with a Spanish guide. Had a wonderful breakfast with some tips from the guide: Beware of falling over the side of the road. Why? Because you can be easily distracted by the landscape!
/ 64.133; -21.933
After a huge delay, this is the first of a few posts about our road trip to Iceland last June and July. While we were there, I wrote a journal about what we did and saw each day, and this is the extended version (with pictures!)
We arrived to Keflavík International Airport (its terminal is named Leifur Eiríksson after the European discoverer of North America), really late: our plane needed refueling before departure and it ate quite a lot of time.
The Language Switch (or how my brain seems to work when learning languages)
4 minutes read | 737 words
From my cheap dictionary
I love learning languages. Since I picked my first Teach yourself English (in Spanish) from my grandparents place when I was 10 years old, I have been fascinated by languages and language learning, first human languages and then also by computer languages. Aside from English, Spanish and Catalan I can defend myself in German and French (enough to get directions and keep simple conversations up, although the last time I was in Germany all Germans I talked to said I could keep up pretty well… Sure they are polite!
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the sixth (and last) post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fifth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fourth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
If I had to gamble before going to Iceland, I would have thought tap water would be horrible.
The Sun street
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the third post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
Weather is not as bad as you may expect.
re
Iceland is one of the few places
where you can park inside a
volcano
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. You can read the day-by-day exploration with plenty of pictures by browsing the tag Iceland, which accounts our road trip. This is the second post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
This is a picture I shot in Iceland, in the Dynjandi Waterfall. If a caption is needed, it would be Never give up. Click the thumbnails to download the high resolution images.
Dynjandi Waterfalls
I have not set any download tracking, thus I don’t know if you are downloading these: Please, if you download one of these wallpapers, please leave a comment in the form below!
If you like this wallpaper, please share in StumbleUpon or Twitter.
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the first post in the series Things you should read about before travelling to Iceland. Be sure to stay tuned for the following posts!
First I would like to say you one thing about Iceland’s food: don’t be scared! They don’t eat anything odd, except for a few national foods which are not that usual: hákari (rotten shark meat) and hrutspungar (pickled ram testicles).
Interesting things to know before going to Iceland As you may remember, Laia and myself went to Iceland for a 2 and half weeks trip last June-July. It was a wonderful experience, managed by the wonderful (and helpful!) people at Nordic Visitor. This is the first post in a series named Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. In these posts I will cover the following (I will add links to the individual posts here as I write them, bookmark this page!
The 100 most common words in Icelandic, automatically generated from Wikipedia
3 minutes read | 556 wordsThe file can be downloaded at the end of the post
As you may already know, I’m travelling to Iceland this July, and started learning Icelandic a few months ago. It advances slowly but firmly, but I found a problem:when you are self-learning a new language, an invaluable tool is a list of most common words.
Tag: improve-yourself
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.
I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?
An image can help your memory…
For how long?
This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.
In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages.
Tag: ios
A bit of Sunday-inspired yak shaving
This is how I handle the dreaded GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review when using Things 3.
Tag: ipad
If you have been paying attention, you may have seen me talk about p5js and generative art lately. Here is a break-down of the why and how.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
It would probably be an understatement to say I’m not a gamer. Last console I got was a Game Boy, 22 years ago (IIRC). Never got a gaming PC.
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Image copyrighted by Lucent Technologies, hosted by Wikimedia Commons and posted here for information purposes
A few months ago I wrote about how I’m using vim in my ipad. You know, I’m an emacs guy, just started writing my own (useful) stuff to improve it. Recently I finished gnusnotes.el, a package which allows you to easily add notes to emails. Of course, before this I had already written emacs code, just that it was only for me.
Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
From my cheap dictionary
I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.
I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo.
Tag: iphone
The year has ended, what has been going on?
This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames (the successor of GraphX on Spark).
It would probably be an understatement to say I’m not a gamer. Last console I got was a Game Boy, 22 years ago (IIRC). Never got a gaming PC.
Tag: ipod
It would probably be an understatement to say I’m not a gamer. Last console I got was a Game Boy, 22 years ago (IIRC). Never got a gaming PC.
From my cheap dictionary
I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.
I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought any app through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying any app and the review was unfaithful to the application.
A few weeks ago I saw in my Google Analytics that someone came to this blog looking for “Origami iPhone case”. As I have a Origami CD case, and several posts on iPhone/iPod Touch games… it was a page hit. But I thought: if I can have a neat CD case, I can also design a neat origami case for an iPhone! Said and… done. It took a few tries (and a few days), as you can see below.
Made with Sketchbook Mobile…
in an iPod Touch
All hail hypnotoad… in real life
I want to start by saying that I might buy an iPad, and definitely like it, in an abstract setting. But I think that Steve Jobs is kind of blind through his own charisma. He likes the iPad… then it should be liked (and bought) by everyone.
I don’t think the iPad is gona be a hit.
I got linked to Ipad’s “history”: Someone on MetaFilter posted a link to my emacs on iPod blog post in the thread about the launch of Apple’s iPad.
You may also like
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Linux,iPod,Mac,emacs)),5)
This is where Linux started. Minix, from the bible on operating systems. You can easily install it on minivMac for your iPod, download it from this link and install the disk image in your iPod as usual. Then, unpack the files inside.
Fifteen minutes later…
When unpacking is finished, just open the MacMinix app, and Minix will be up and running.
By the way, the username for MacMinix is root, and the password is Geheim!
Using emacs on the go in your iPod Touch / iPhone Maybe you remember a previous post on installing vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for the iPod Touch. I did it just for the geek factor… and for being able to edit things with Emacs. I have emacs installed:
But what’s the use of emacs, without files to edit? It didn’t bother me… at first. Keep on reading for how to keep in sync files edited inside the vMac emacs and files in your Linux box, along with the “why should I use emacs in my iPod/iPhone?
This is a follow up of my previous post on Retro on iPod Touch. Previously I reviewed Mini vMac Apple Mac Plus emulator. This time also comes an emulator (sort of). ScummVM is self-described as a collection of game engine recreations, and is available for several platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux at least… also several handhelds and game consoles). For me, its main use is to replay old LucasArts graphical adventures.
After buying my iPod Touch and playing a little with it, I realised that battery life was a problem, with the WiFi always on. Thus, I was always bringing up Settins-WiFi and turning on and off. There was no easy and quick way to do it… Until I jailbroke it. I installed SBSettings, and its first use was that. Swipe the upper status bar, and the menu shown above appears.
The free iPod stand
Right: middle line, left top line
In this post I will explain how to recycle an old credit card to build a stand for your iPod touch / iPhone. You can choose from 3 designs, depending on your preferred inclination.
Here is what you will need:
A printed version of the shape. Scroll down for the jpg’d version A card Scissors Something to write A small file
A few days ago I jailbroke my iPod touch. Just for the geek factor, first, as I thought I could get a C compiler on it. I can’t yet, so I just have it jailbreaken for a few applications. I’ll start my review for a long time loved application in Linux and Mac: Mini vMac.Mini vMac is a hardware emulator, which emulates a whole Mac Plus from the eighties. You just need a real Mac ROM, from a Mac you or someone you know owns.
From The Design of the Emacs Logo
I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. I even use it in my iPod touch, through minivMac. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.
Mathematician, Linux user, already had an iPod (iPod nano), recently bought a netbook. Why did I buy an iPod touch?
Tag: islensk
The Language Switch (or how my brain seems to work when learning languages)
4 minutes read | 737 words
From my cheap dictionary
I love learning languages. Since I picked my first Teach yourself English (in Spanish) from my grandparents place when I was 10 years old, I have been fascinated by languages and language learning, first human languages and then also by computer languages. Aside from English, Spanish and Catalan I can defend myself in German and French (enough to get directions and keep simple conversations up, although the last time I was in Germany all Germans I talked to said I could keep up pretty well… Sure they are polite!
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the sixth (and last) post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fifth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fourth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
If I had to gamble before going to Iceland, I would have thought tap water would be horrible.
The Sun street
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the third post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
Weather is not as bad as you may expect.
re
Iceland is one of the few places
where you can park inside a
volcano
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. You can read the day-by-day exploration with plenty of pictures by browsing the tag Iceland, which accounts our road trip. This is the second post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the first post in the series Things you should read about before travelling to Iceland. Be sure to stay tuned for the following posts!
First I would like to say you one thing about Iceland’s food: don’t be scared! They don’t eat anything odd, except for a few national foods which are not that usual: hákari (rotten shark meat) and hrutspungar (pickled ram testicles).
Interesting things to know before going to Iceland As you may remember, Laia and myself went to Iceland for a 2 and half weeks trip last June-July. It was a wonderful experience, managed by the wonderful (and helpful!) people at Nordic Visitor. This is the first post in a series named Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. In these posts I will cover the following (I will add links to the individual posts here as I write them, bookmark this page!
The 100 most common words in Icelandic, automatically generated from Wikipedia
3 minutes read | 556 wordsThe file can be downloaded at the end of the post
As you may already know, I’m travelling to Iceland this July, and started learning Icelandic a few months ago. It advances slowly but firmly, but I found a problem:when you are self-learning a new language, an invaluable tool is a list of most common words.
Tag: javascript
A bit of Sunday-inspired yak shaving
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
Here are the details about how my procedural sketch Iris works. This has been one of the fastest and most enjoyable sketches I have created lately
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
Some details of my p5js sketch Blot/Painting
Generative art using p5.js
Tag: julia
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
Tag: kafka
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
October Kafka London Meetup - Jay Kreps: Distributed stream processing with Apache Kafka
2 minutes read | 263 words
This has been the first time I could attend the Apache Kafka meetup in London. Previous meetings had me in Barcelona or flying. First realisation: it is a surprisingly crowded meetup! Clearly, everyone is using Kafka, even if it is not clear from the outside. Oh, and the food was pretty good, too. Thanks to the sponsor (which I have sadly forgotten).
I really enjoyed this one. The speaker was Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent (and author of I Heart Logs), so, basically, a Kafka top committer himself.
Tag: keyboard
My girlfriend likes to joke/complain that I have more keyboards than hands. And indeed, I have probably a dozen or so different keyboards, most of them bluetooth. But, I have found the best one for the day-to-day work (sadly it is not bluetooth). It is a Gergo.
I have been looking for the perfect, really portable Bluetooth keyboard for several years. Typing on the go, or having a truly mobile office in your pockets is a really interesting concept for a consultant like me. You never know when opportunity or need may arise.
A year and a half ago I ordered what it looked like the perfect keyboard for that setup, but (even though it was supposed to arrive 3-4 months later) I’m still waiting.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Tag: kubernetes
Back on track.
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
Tag: languages
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Note from 2020: The domain mentioned in the post is no longer active (or mine at least), I cancelled this project some time ago
Last week I wrote about ~whatlanguageis.com~, my first simple try at creating a Django powered site. How did it came to be?
In the last few months have been writing and thinking about several ideas to process social data with Python, undoubtedly motivated by the great book Mining the Social Web.
From my cheap dictionary
I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.
I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo.
From my cheap dictionary
Last February I set myself a goal for these next three months (February, March and April): to learn Gaelic. The time is up and I must confess I have not made a lot of advances. The reasons are plenty, and most are shared with whoever wants to learn a new language. They are even harder for people learning a few languages at once, the kind of language nerds that have way too many Teach Yourself books on languages.
Have you thought about playing
dice letter gamesin a
foreign language?
It’s been more than a month since I started my goal of learning Gaelic. I’m not happy with how it is going, and I’m the only one to blame for it. Why?
First, I have too many commitments. A few are with myself, others are with my girlfriend and then I have my thesis and research work. All together are way too much to handle in an usual work day, even in an ‘extended work day’, i.
From my cheap dictionary
As a byproduct of The Language Switch, I was invited to send a guest post to Bitesize Irish Gaelic, a wonderful site where you can learn Irish gaelic online.
Last year I decided to learn Icelandic because we were going to Iceland, this year I was learning Gaelic… Thus we decided that Ireland might be a good place to visit this summer on holidays, encouraging me to learn better this new language.
Tag: larboç
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Tag: latex
Not sure if bug or feature, but this is hard to pull off.
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple’s “problems”. If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.
As the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan… at the moment.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
A few weeks ago I realised that I didn’t have a printed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art
of
War,
and this thought collided head on with another old thought I had: could I use
pdfpages to create A6 booklets? I use it frequently to turn my papers into
handy A4 booklets (a few A4 folded in half), butI did not know if I could do it
another time to generate A5 booklets, or even another time to get a small and
nice A6 booklet
or the trouble with hard-coded paths and ineffective menus.
Cross platform page-layout software:
Scribus. Now with more LaTeX
I am supposed to present a poster in a conference, about some work I am doing. I asked office mates about what they used… A Mac user suggested Pages, and I asked a more Linux oriented, LaTeX savvy, and he told me: forget about LaTeX and use some WYSIWYG program, you’ll save time and effort.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
For a while I have been either not LaTeXing a lot, or not using AucTeX frequently. Strange indeed! But in July, while in Göttingen I wrote part of some lecture notes of one of the courses. And again, used auctex-preview in emacs to find errors in what I was writing.
I can’t even tell how wonderful it is, to share the source with the images with the formulas. An image is worth more than a googol words.
Softcover binding your own books is easier than you think
Bookbinding for dummies As of late, I have been printing quite a lot of long mathematical papers, and a few free pdf-books, or tutorials. And I wanted them properly bound, but didn’t want them so much as to pay for it. A few months ago, I found this tutorial on hardback binding. Although the tutorial, method and result are great, it is quite a lengthy effort.
Get arbitrary size fonts in LaTeX You have probably wondered how to get really big fonts in titles, or anywhere in a LaTeX document.
\usepackage{fix-cm} % Allows for Computer Modern fonts of arbitrary sizes
…
\fontsize{60}{70}\bfseries A SAMPLE
…
You are done. Easy, wasn’t it? You may also be interested in ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Latex,Linux)),5)
If you are printing a lot of… well, anything, sure you would love to make booklets out of what you print. If you happen to be a mathematician, you sure are printing lots of papers with more than 20 pages, which turn to 10 unmanageable pages when double-sided. But making a booklet allows you to turn them to just a little folded thing that you can read easier.
When printing in MacOSX you can print booklets, but they are supposed to be cut, not folded across as you would do to bind a book.
Tag: leadership
The dbt issue
Tag: learning
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Tag: linux
These probably qualify as the most one weird trick I have figured out this year.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Using Taskwarrior Instead Of Emacs+Org Mode For To-Do And Appointment Tracking
6 minutes read | 1189 words
One of my fractal images
I have a confession to make: I’m not using emacs+org mode to keep my to-do list and appointments. What? The same emacs junkie that used emacs for (almost) everything last December gave up emacs? Yes, the same, but only gave up for this use case. I have some good reasons about why I am using TaskWarrior. Which does not mean that I could not be using emacs for the same, I just wanted to try something new.
Yes, that’s me with a polariser.
Wait, playing Dungeon Crawl
in your Nanonote?
Installing Debian on the Ben is pretty easy after the work of the people at pyneo.org. I follow mostly their instructions which can befound here.
The first step is installing the package xburst-tools, following the instructions from the Qi Hardware Wiki about reflashing your Ben Nanonote.
The package can be downloaded in .deb format for Debian-like distributions.
The gnus logo,
from gnus homepage
When the time to choose a mail reader for emacs came, as part of my emacs 30 Day Challenge, there were not really a lot of options. A long, long time ago I had tried vm (view mail) with no luck. I don’t remember the details (it was something like 3 years ago), but the results where unappealing. The only contenders where gnus and wanderlust.
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
You can check the challenge updates below:
This week I’ll be in a workshop on Complex Dynamics in Warsaw, and will present a poster titled Approximating bifurcation loci by zeros of functions. This is heavily based on a poster I presented last year in Copenhagen (titled Sets approximating regions of instability). The underlying work in progress has changed quite a bit since then, but this does not show in the poster. I just solve some problems in the exposition, from the questions I got back then.
Yacas is an advanced computer algebra system, with its own programming language and a lot of handful operators available.
It comes handy when you need to do that odd symbolic computation which is too big to handle by hand (or you are plain lazy).
By looking at the wikipedia entry, I discovered an startling truth: as of 2009, yacas is no longer maintained.
I should have guessed, because yacas does not compile out of the box (the program needed to generate the manuals does not compile), and this led to some naïve patching (just removing all instances of said program…).
A month ago, Oscar del Ben posted an interesting tip in his blog to take power naps when you are feeling tired, How to Get a Quick 5-10 Minutes Nap Without Using an Alarm Clock. His idea is simple: pick a spoon on your hand. Once you fall asleep, your grip will relax, the spoon falls and you awaken with the sound. I found it amusing and interesting, as I am one of those types who feel really well after a 10 minutes nap.
Last Tuesday I made the move. I ditched Ubuntu and installed Arch Linux in my Acer Aspire One. After my post Linux is a time killer (which attracted a lot of attention, and didn’t really carry the message I wanted) I got a lot of comments to think about. The two most suggested Linux distributions were Debian/unstable and Arch Linux. Well, maybe Arch Linux was not that talked about, but the following comment bought me out:
Preface: I have been using Linux since around 1998, when I installed Debian from scratch in my old Pentium II. I am more end-user than power user, but the computer I use most often (my netbook) has Linux in it by default. Also, my office computer is a Linux computer. And I am writing this in my MacBook. Which is not Linux, but at least it is Unix. What comes now is a personal rant, after a fight with my netbook.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
I discovered this tool by accident, when a colleague asked me why I printed a .txt file straight without using a2ps first. My first reaction of course was thinking What? and promptly asking google.
Google answered with this page, and it was interesting enough to deserve an apt-get install. And indeed, it is great! Usually, when I have some straight text file I need to print, I use emacs old postscript-print-buffer, which is nice, but not as nice as all options a2ps has.
Last saturday I was in a porting mood, and tackled two interesting packages to have in the Ben NanoNote: yacas and 4th.
Yacas (Yet Another Computer Algebra System) is a very interesting application to have in such a small device. The best calculator I have used is my old faithful HP49g. But in these days, it is bulky, heavy and slow. It was superseded by m48 (a HP48+ emulator) inside my iPod Touch.
Do you own a Mac? I use both MacOS and Linux everyday, and found myself with a problem. Before I found Shutter taking screenshots in Linux felt like a PITA. In MacOS you can take region screenshots by pressing Cmd-Shift-4. And I missed this feature in Linux, until I cared enough to look for a solution.
Shutter was the answer, an open source screenshot grabber that fills my needs, and probably yours too.
Yes, you can! Adding colors to terminal output is possible. You already know it, from ls –color In this post I show you a script that does it, in a simple way. I don’t have a full range of colors implemented, but you can find all here.
This is the sed-processed output given by Gcal. The original source looks like
As you can see, I used as identifiers XML-like expressions.
The Ben NanoNote has very few applications, as of now. And one it has (among a few nice others), is Gcal. I didn’t know what Gcal was, and the Qi hardware wiki page on Gcal pointed me to this quite nice tutorial: The many uses of Gcal.
The tutorial is quite good, but somewhat long, and lacks a few specific examples, so I decided to write just what I read in that tutorial, mixed with the uses I am putting it to, so it is more a Gcal use cases than a full blown tutorial like that.
Screenshot compositing, made with free software
Since I bought the Nanonote, I have been finding new uses for it. Music player, note taker, voice recorder. I can also use it to start learning Python again, or Perl, which are (together with Lua) the languages currently installed by default.
After my first successful port (gnugo), I decided to try something else, and while idling at the train I thought that pMARS, the portable Memory Array Redcode Simulator was probably a good bet.
The command line. That small place, where a lot can happen. And more so if you are a Linux user… How to maximize it? Where to harness its power?
I discovered commandlinefu.com a few years ago, while looking for a way to do… something. I don’t even enter that often, although it is a brilliant place to discover how to do X in Linux/UNIX.
Among its all time greats I found some gems, and some others I discovered elsewhere, or even I made up.
Since I bought the Ben NanoNote, I thought I needed to port something to it, as the biggest point with the NanoNote is developing to it, as its wiki says.
David Reyes, from Tuxbrain did a great work by porting gnuchess to the Nano and documenting it in his blog.
Of course, I want to port big things, but I’m not a great Linux guy, just average, so this tutorial makes a great starting point.
Has someone ever told you “Don’t re-invent the wheel”? Again and again I read somewhere around the net that ’re-inventing the wheel' is one of the worse errors a programmer can fall into. In fact, I’ve read it so often that the only thought of doing it makes me re-think over and over other ways of solving (or ignoring) the problem.
But here, I advocate my pro’s (the cons can be found elsewhere) for re-inventing the wheel, or at least not being frightened of it.
The Ben NanoNote: smaller than my wallet!
The Ben NanoNote: A computer smaller than my wallet If you are new here, have a look around and if you like what you find, don’t forget to subscribe.
Today I received by post my Ben NanoNote, from Tuxbrain. What is it? A palmtop computer, really small. It has also really small specs… small screen, small keyboard, little RAM, and so on.
After following a twitter feed about programming, I got overwhelmed by FORTH related posts. I had already read something about forth before (stack-based, somewhat fast, good for embedded devices), but so many bit.ly links pointing to webs of implementations of FORTH and FORTH things made me decide to, well, take a deeper look.
Looks like a nice language, having something I enjoy about Lisp (interactivity) and something I like about PostScript (stack based).
The easiest way to debug: valgrind with the most powerful text editor: emacs A few days ago my office mate told me about the great debugging tool known as valgrind. Before I have been using the great pairing of emacs+gdb to debug segmentation faults and memory leaks… Now I would never use gdb for this. Moreover, I found a way to somewhat use it from within a shell in emacs to allow fast error browsing.
I got linked to Ipad’s “history”: Someone on MetaFilter posted a link to my emacs on iPod blog post in the thread about the launch of Apple’s iPad.
You may also like
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Linux,iPod,Mac,emacs)),5)
This is where Linux started. Minix, from the bible on operating systems. You can easily install it on minivMac for your iPod, download it from this link and install the disk image in your iPod as usual. Then, unpack the files inside.
Fifteen minutes later…
When unpacking is finished, just open the MacMinix app, and Minix will be up and running.
By the way, the username for MacMinix is root, and the password is Geheim!
From flickr
A few months ago, I realised I was checking some pages frequently for changes. They were some congress pages, and I was waiting for them to add information about registration and such.
Then I realised I could write a script to do it, using diff and wget. You can get it below. You have to edit it to add the pages you want to follow, then run it with the “write” option to download the first version, then edit your crontab file (crontab -e) to run it every day at a specified time with the “diff” option.
Using emacs on the go in your iPod Touch / iPhone Maybe you remember a previous post on installing vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for the iPod Touch. I did it just for the geek factor… and for being able to edit things with Emacs. I have emacs installed:
But what’s the use of emacs, without files to edit? It didn’t bother me… at first. Keep on reading for how to keep in sync files edited inside the vMac emacs and files in your Linux box, along with the “why should I use emacs in my iPod/iPhone?
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
With GIMP’s “Map to sphere”
A few years ago, while I was still mainly a Windows user, I read ‘Pragmatic programmer: From journeyman to master’, and learnt about Version Control Systems. You know, SVN, CVS, Git, Darcs. As I was just a single user working locally (just wanted the incremental and logged backups), I installed RCS. Almost the oldest, and in some sense the most simple. It can work locally, just with a file of delta (text added from one revision to the next) which is a plain text, human readable file.
From The Design of the Emacs Logo
I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. I even use it in my iPod touch, through minivMac. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.
A quick one: Graphical configuration for fluxbox: fluxconf. You can just apt-get it. I found out about it in tuxmachines.org, following this link. But after using it I realized I had lost 3 entries… I am not sure if it was a bug, or what (they all had parentheses in them!). Use it at your own risk!
or the trouble with hard-coded paths and ineffective menus.
Cross platform page-layout software:
Scribus. Now with more LaTeX
I am supposed to present a poster in a conference, about some work I am doing. I asked office mates about what they used… A Mac user suggested Pages, and I asked a more Linux oriented, LaTeX savvy, and he told me: forget about LaTeX and use some WYSIWYG program, you’ll save time and effort.
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
Here are some pictures and images which look pretty good together with my Fluxbox configuration, in my Netbook. Here they are for your enjoyment. They are supposed to be small, not to drain too many system resources. I will upload later the butterfly in higher resolution.
You may also be interested in
Two weeks, still loving Fluxbox Three dee Acer Aspire One 8.9' + Ubuntu + Fluxbox Whistle control your computer (Linux&Mac)
Two and a half weeks ago, I got a netbook and promptly installed Ubuntu, followed by Fluxbox (as already explained). And after two weeks of almost continued use, I like it even more than when I decided to use it. Some of the points I really enjoy (in no particular order).
Strong keyboard shortcuts. As an emacs junkie as I am, I love keyboard shortcuts. And Fluxbox is incredibly flexible in defining or removing them: Even system-wide shortcuts are customizable.
I don’t know exactly how (well, now I remember: I was looking for a transparent background patch for xclock), but a while ago, in Göttingen I stumbled on a 3D file system browser, called XCruiser (you can get it with ‘sudo apt-get install xcruise’). It has not been maintaned for a long while, and it can’t even open the files you “travel”, so it is pretty useless, albeit amazing.
Last monday I bought an Acer Aspire One, 8.9', with an extra 6-cell battery and 15 minutes later I installed Ubuntu (Netbook Remix version) on it, and after realizing everything was working smoothly (except for the SD card reader… anyway, I have an external device for doing so) I installed the Fluxbox window manager. New: You may also be interested in Two weeks: still loving Fluxbox.
Here you can see the FluxBox Root menu, Conky in the “desktop”
Screenshots!
Back when I was in school, I had a really nice game in my 80286 computer, under Windows 3.1. Yes, it was 15 years ago… The game was Hyperoid, by Edward Hutchins. When I got my first Pentium with Windows 95, I longed that game… and the 3.1. version didn’t work completely OK in it. Anyway I played… then found Hyperoid95. I even recompiled it, to add firepower (the author of this version cut the fire speed).
I “discovered” Nethack a month or so ago, while being bored to death (after three unsuccessful attempts in proving something) in my office.
Myself with my dog Hachi
I play the MacOs Tiles (or QT) version, which can be found in Nethack.org, configured for ASCII color play. The configuration file is a file called .nethackrc in your home directory, mine looks like:
OPTIONS=!autopickup,ascii_map, color, hilite_pet, lit_corridor, showexp, showscore, boulder:0;
Tag: lisp
Sensitive information blanked
The gnusnotes.el package, with delete and edit capabilities is now available in the marmalade package repository. This post just explains why, how and what (code at the end, too)
Last month I switched email clients (for the 4th time in the past year.) I’ve passed through gnus, Thunderbird, mail.app and settled with Sparrow. Just 2 days before Sparrow was bought by Google I left for gnus (lucky moment!
And e/2 Appears from Nowhere! (Follow up to 'And e Appears from Nowhere')
3 minutes read | 464 words
You may remember a post I wrote a month ago titled And e Appears from Nowhere. It was based (through some blogs I read) on a footnote from Prime Obsession(Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly. Select a random number between 0 and 1. Now select another and add it to the first. Keep doing this, piling on random numbers.
Today, while I was thinking of the best implementation solution for the vector operations, I realised that I am just not motivated by writing a raytracer in Forth. I’ll have to find something more interesting, or at least, more Forth minded to work on.
If I want to raytrace, better to improve the Lisp raytracer, which is sitting idly in my Code/Lisp folder. Steps that will follow in the raytracer path:
Stochastic hill climbing: Sisyphus pushes an image Last year, Slashdot published this interesting piece of work: Genetic evolution of the Mona Lisa. The idea is to approximate an image by a certain number of semitransparent polygons, randomly chosen. I liked very much the idea, and as every year I try to come up with some Christmas postcard related to maths or programming I gave it a try. So I wrote a LISP version… way too slow.
A LISP random triangle generator. Also wrote a C version.
As you may remember, I spent quite some time this August with Lavaurs algorithm for the topological identification of the circle corresponding to the Mandelbrot set. After that, I spent quite some more trying to do pictures of external rays to show side by side. I was not able… and then found Mandel.
Thanks to Mandel, LISP and my Lavaurs code
Really nice program, with lots and lots of options (and I met the programmer, which happens to be also mathematician, we met at a conference).
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
Stephen Wolfram (owner of Wolfram Research) has released (after announcing it in March) Wolfram Alpha, a kind of web search aimed at natural language and intelligent answers. JME pointed me to this question:
Taken from Wolfram Alpha
The strange thing about it is that is is fully written in Mathematica (or so they say, 5 million lines of code). Strange indeed, Mathematica isn’t a particularly fast or “comfy” programming language.
Tag: london
Almost two months ago (time sure flies) I attended for the second time the conference Scala eXchange, one of the largest Scala conferences in the world, and which happens to be 1 tube stop from the office you can find me from time to time in London.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
October Kafka London Meetup - Jay Kreps: Distributed stream processing with Apache Kafka
2 minutes read | 263 words
This has been the first time I could attend the Apache Kafka meetup in London. Previous meetings had me in Barcelona or flying. First realisation: it is a surprisingly crowded meetup! Clearly, everyone is using Kafka, even if it is not clear from the outside. Oh, and the food was pretty good, too. Thanks to the sponsor (which I have sadly forgotten).
I really enjoyed this one. The speaker was Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent (and author of I Heart Logs), so, basically, a Kafka top committer himself.
Tag: mac
These probably qualify as the most one weird trick I have figured out this year.
My girlfriend likes to joke/complain that I have more keyboards than hands. And indeed, I have probably a dozen or so different keyboards, most of them bluetooth. But, I have found the best one for the day-to-day work (sadly it is not bluetooth). It is a Gergo.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
Even though I have been a long time user of oh-my-zsh on zsh (moved from plain bash to zsh like 10 years ago), I have been minimal on my use of its theme capabilities. I have used the default theme forever: robbyrussell. But recently I was showing my friend @craftycoder the tweaks I have on my system (fzf, autojump, etc) and he showed me this theme, agnoster.
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
I’ve been thinking about getting a new Macbook lately (my heart and wallet were divided among a 11" Air or a 15" Retina Pro). My 4-year old Macbook (Early 2008 I think, 2 GB Ram, Intel Core Duo 2.4 GHz) was showing its age. Mainly when I had the RAM and cache hungry inhabitants of my dock active: Yorufukurou (the best twitter client for managing multiple accounts in a Mac I’ve seen) and Sparrow (mail client).
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple’s “problems”. If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.
As the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan… at the moment.
The gnus logo,
from gnus homepage
When the time to choose a mail reader for emacs came, as part of my emacs 30 Day Challenge, there were not really a lot of options. A long, long time ago I had tried vm (view mail) with no luck. I don’t remember the details (it was something like 3 years ago), but the results where unappealing. The only contenders where gnus and wanderlust.
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
This week I’ll be in a workshop on Complex Dynamics in Warsaw, and will present a poster titled Approximating bifurcation loci by zeros of functions. This is heavily based on a poster I presented last year in Copenhagen (titled Sets approximating regions of instability). The underlying work in progress has changed quite a bit since then, but this does not show in the poster. I just solve some problems in the exposition, from the questions I got back then.
Yes, I know it: it is easy. But I will be doing a wipe and reinstall of my MacBook, and when I need to reinstall everything I want a place to check for the steps I did. I found almost all tips needed here.
The first step is checking for Mercurial (wikipedia) in your system. Open a terminal and type
hg version
If your terminal complains about command not found, you don’t have Mercurial installed.
Made with Sketchbook Mobile…
in an iPod Touch
All hail hypnotoad… in real life
I want to start by saying that I might buy an iPad, and definitely like it, in an abstract setting. But I think that Steve Jobs is kind of blind through his own charisma. He likes the iPad… then it should be liked (and bought) by everyone.
I don’t think the iPad is gona be a hit.
A few days ago I jailbroke my iPod touch. Just for the geek factor, first, as I thought I could get a C compiler on it. I can’t yet, so I just have it jailbreaken for a few applications. I’ll start my review for a long time loved application in Linux and Mac: Mini vMac.Mini vMac is a hardware emulator, which emulates a whole Mac Plus from the eighties. You just need a real Mac ROM, from a Mac you or someone you know owns.
From The Design of the Emacs Logo
I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. I even use it in my iPod touch, through minivMac. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.
As you may remember, I spent quite some time this August with Lavaurs algorithm for the topological identification of the circle corresponding to the Mandelbrot set. After that, I spent quite some more trying to do pictures of external rays to show side by side. I was not able… and then found Mandel.
Thanks to Mandel, LISP and my Lavaurs code
Really nice program, with lots and lots of options (and I met the programmer, which happens to be also mathematician, we met at a conference).
Mathematician, Linux user, already had an iPod (iPod nano), recently bought a netbook. Why did I buy an iPod touch?
or the trouble with hard-coded paths and ineffective menus.
Cross platform page-layout software:
Scribus. Now with more LaTeX
I am supposed to present a poster in a conference, about some work I am doing. I asked office mates about what they used… A Mac user suggested Pages, and I asked a more Linux oriented, LaTeX savvy, and he told me: forget about LaTeX and use some WYSIWYG program, you’ll save time and effort.
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
I feel like I contributed something. I rewrote Wikipedia’s Siegel disk page, adding references and images. It is now quite dense… Ill have to re-read it to simplify it several times. Or someone else… Wikipedia’s wonders.
Snapshot! (Via Paparazzi!)
Screenshots!
Back when I was in school, I had a really nice game in my 80286 computer, under Windows 3.1. Yes, it was 15 years ago… The game was Hyperoid, by Edward Hutchins. When I got my first Pentium with Windows 95, I longed that game… and the 3.1. version didn’t work completely OK in it. Anyway I played… then found Hyperoid95. I even recompiled it, to add firepower (the author of this version cut the fire speed).
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
There is a plain and easy way to download YouTube .flv videos (which you can watch with VLC Media Player, or in a Mac with Quicktime Player and additional plug-ins).
To do so, you need the Safari Web Browser (Mac or Windows). Go to your desired page hosting a Flash Video file, and select Activity in the Window menu. There you will find the files being downloaded in the web-page you are visiting… double click the bigger one (as usually flash videos are the biggest files in YouTube pages, if you can’t find such a big file, check for the .
I have been using several productivy enhancers (or time-wasting avoiders) as of late. Although I find them quite useful, I wonder if I could find something even better.
Think: I have already talked about think elsewhere. Think enables the user to focus on just one application, seeing nothing more. It is like the blinders of a horse to keep you from distracting.
LeechBlock: A FireFox addon, which allows you to block certain sites at certain times of the week, or after a predetermined amount of time has been wasted there.
There are a few Mac applications I use so often, I couldn’t live without them. And most of them are free, or really kind shareware.
Caffeine: Keep your Mac from sleeping.
Carbon Emacs (F): Well, this is cross-platform. And you know, I can’t live without it. Plus, Carbon Emacs has some nifty additions. Check it out!
Disk Inventory X (F): Shows graphically the size of files sitting in your drives.
New: The previous version is rubbish! Just add your MP3 encoded files to iTunes library, select the entire album, choose get info from right-clicking it, go to the last tab (options) and select: Part of a compilation, remember position, skip when shuffling and in media type, Audibook. And you are done in a moment.
Time-wasting version by Google: This is just to remind myself how to do this simple thing. I got the information from here (via Google).
Tag: machine-learning
Happy new year!
Sweet, sweet holidays.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
Tag: management
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
This turned out a long one
Trust between business stakeholders and engineering (and data, analytics, operations…) teams is a tricky matter.
Meetings galore.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
The dbt issue
Next week I’m on holidays!
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
Happy new year!
Christmas edition!
Back on track.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Tag: maps
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Tag: markdown
Not sure if bug or feature, but this is hard to pull off.
Tag: maths
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
Next week I start a new job 😮
Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
Sweet, sweet holidays.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
The last of 2020.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
This is a short edition.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
Almost two months ago (time sure flies) I attended for the second time the conference Scala eXchange, one of the largest Scala conferences in the world, and which happens to be 1 tube stop from the office you can find me from time to time in London.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.
At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year
Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.
Started a long time ago. It was supposed to be about a phenomenon leading to chaos: separatrix splitting. I got a research grant. I worked on holomorphic dynamics. Travelled. Presented. Too many roadblocks with the separatrix problem. Switched topics. Welcome to a different new world, infinite dimensional dynamical systems. I read the literature. Researched, proved some things. My grant ran out. I worked. A lot. Too many times I considered giving up.
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing.
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
A few months ago (woah, so long already) I had an impulse buy: I purchased a circular slide rule from Etsy. It was cheap, and I had always wanted one, so… I just bought it (a neat addition to my Addiator.)
I guess if you are geeky enough to read mostlymaths.net, you know how a slide rule works. Although I knew how to use it, getting to grips with it took a little while.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
This was computed using PVM and the full PDF generated is 16k pixels wide
Today is Iceland’s National Day (commemorating their independence day and the date of birth of Jón Sigurðsson), and to commemorate it I share this image with everyone.
I computed this image a long, long time ago (using the Distance Estimator Method, paralellised with PVM using 16 computers, it took just 2 minutes). The full file is a 30MB pdf, which I printed large-size (2 meters wide), and sits in my office.
Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple’s “problems”. If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.
As the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan… at the moment.
Next week is the final exam of the course I’m giving, Numerical Analysis. Classes finished before Christmas, and this week is for students questions. I had one of these sessions this morning, when a pair of students came with a few questions related to the problems I solved on the blackboard.
All were quick to solve, until one simple question arose, concerning a trivial problem in Calculus 1 (or Analysis 1, as we name it here).
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
You can check the challenge updates below:
Hi readers! (woah… 235 already! I’m so glad you’re here with me!)
This week I’m in Warsaw for a workshop (as I already commented in last post when I talked about the poster I am presenting).
I was expecting to use idle hours between talks and afternoons to write posts and post a little… But my internet connection is inexistent. This post is coming from an open wifi connection, which gets connected and disconnected at random, and when at its peak, just makes 3Kb/s.
This week I’ll be in a workshop on Complex Dynamics in Warsaw, and will present a poster titled Approximating bifurcation loci by zeros of functions. This is heavily based on a poster I presented last year in Copenhagen (titled Sets approximating regions of instability). The underlying work in progress has changed quite a bit since then, but this does not show in the poster. I just solve some problems in the exposition, from the questions I got back then.
Lately my pile of papers to read has been growing steadily, and I’ve done very little to read all that stuff marked with “will read someday”. It had to come to an end, and it did with my previous Task Bankruptcy.
Reading research papers can be a huge waste of time… Or end up in forming big piles of To be read someday. The problem is, usually someday never means today.
And e/2 Appears from Nowhere! (Follow up to 'And e Appears from Nowhere')
3 minutes read | 464 words
You may remember a post I wrote a month ago titled And e Appears from Nowhere. It was based (through some blogs I read) on a footnote from Prime Obsession(Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly. Select a random number between 0 and 1. Now select another and add it to the first. Keep doing this, piling on random numbers.
Two weeks ago it was the beginning of this years lectures. Currently I’m solving problems in the blackboard, 2 hours per week and take care of one computer lab (programming in C, but they have already done a C programming course and another course of numerical computations with C), all for our Numerical Analysis course (7th semester). This is the same schedule I had 3 years ago, also last year I had one computer lab each semester.
Yacas is an advanced computer algebra system, with its own programming language and a lot of handful operators available.
It comes handy when you need to do that odd symbolic computation which is too big to handle by hand (or you are plain lazy).
By looking at the wikipedia entry, I discovered an startling truth: as of 2009, yacas is no longer maintained.
I should have guessed, because yacas does not compile out of the box (the program needed to generate the manuals does not compile), and this led to some naïve patching (just removing all instances of said program…).
As I posted in Best Posts I Have Read in June and July, I liked a lot a numerical experiment in Re: Factor, a blog about learning the Factor programming language. The idea comes from another blog, this time about Clojure (a Lisp dialect running in the Java Virtual Machine), based on a footnote from Prime Obsession (Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly.
Most of you may not know who Vladimir Arnold (Владимир Арнольд, also written as Vladimir Arnol’d) was, but for me his death on 3rd June 2010,was some kind of landmark. I own two books by him (Mathematical aspects of classical and celestial mechanics [1] and Mathematical methods of classical mechanics [2]), and are quite high in my list of most checked books, at least when I was starting my journey into the realm of dynamical systems.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m on my way to learn forth, and to do so, rewrite my Lispy raytracer into a.. Forthy raytracer. Of course, the first steps are deciding on some implementation ideas.
I decided to allocate a few global variables (for “current point”, “current vector”, “light source”, etc), to avoid too much clutter in the stack. This way it will be cleaner, maybe even cleaner than my Lisp version.
The easiest way to debug: valgrind with the most powerful text editor: emacs A few days ago my office mate told me about the great debugging tool known as valgrind. Before I have been using the great pairing of emacs+gdb to debug segmentation faults and memory leaks… Now I would never use gdb for this. Moreover, I found a way to somewhat use it from within a shell in emacs to allow fast error browsing.
Maybe you remember my previous post about detection of copied assignments? Well, now I can say it succeeded. CJuicer is a flex script, generating a lexycal analyzer with a rudimentary parser of C code, it outputs a PostScript with the “logical tree” of loops, function calls and conditionals. Same trees, copied assignment (unless it is simple code, then almost everyone writes the same), without problems with changing names of variables. Thus it could beat diff.
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
As I said in a previous post, I am looking for some way to detect copied code. I have now a working prototype of a “code juicer”. From a C file it creates a set of PostScript files (well, almost, as they need postprocessing) which are later processed and selected to print. As an example, here is the output applied to a Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 4-5.
It is something like an execution tree, with function calls squared, and different slopes for if, for, while clauses.
Pieces of an ENIGMA machine, from Flickr
Assume you have a set of alumni, which are due an individual programming assignment. All have the same assignment (as it is hard to come up with several), and it is hard enough that copying from each other passes for everyone’s mind. As a teacher, how do you detect this?
From my point of view, there are fundamentally two different kinds of copy:
As you may remember, I spent quite some time this August with Lavaurs algorithm for the topological identification of the circle corresponding to the Mandelbrot set. After that, I spent quite some more trying to do pictures of external rays to show side by side. I was not able… and then found Mandel.
Thanks to Mandel, LISP and my Lavaurs code
Really nice program, with lots and lots of options (and I met the programmer, which happens to be also mathematician, we met at a conference).
As you may already know, I presented a poster at a conference recently, and did the set up with Scribus, the texts with LaTeX with the Beamer and Beamerposter packages.
Setting up
Note from 2019: I can’t find the final version of that poster, only a modified version from a few months later for another conference.
The first piece of advise, is to set page guides where needed (in the Page menu, you can put them at a certain numerical place, and then move them along) and then Snap to guides in the same menu.
With Sketchbook Mobile
The concepts of “future”, “job stability” or even “location” are quite fuzzy when in Mathematics. I think I don’t know any PhD student who knows what he will be doing in 3 years, what he will be working on (not what he will be researching, but working…) or even where he will be.
1-2 years of Master+Master thesis
2-6 years of PhD thesis (3-4 years PhD grant+maybe some associated professor, 1-4 years)
København, Denmark
Related posts:
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
Last weekend I attended a conference in Denmark, and a colleague I met there showed me the logo of his University. It is supposed to be a coral… but he said in every party they turn it 270º, so it is the “angry elk”.
Related postsParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
Mathematician, Linux user, already had an iPod (iPod nano), recently bought a netbook. Why did I buy an iPod touch?
Just 5 excerpts of it
Related posts:
And “e” appears from nowhere!9 programming books I have read and somewhat liked…
C code juicer: detecting copied programming assignments
Cron, diff & wget: Watch changes in a webpage
8 reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer
Approximating images with randomly placed translucent triangles
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Linux, Programming)),10)
Emacs fun, in other words. This weekend I’m writing some programs in C, to review major problems before my students ask. Yesterday I finished the part due Wednesday (for them), and today I tackled the final part. But there is some bug somewhere… I always miss on such matrix-here-matrix-there-solve-that.
Today, after battling for an hour, I realized I missed the “intellisense” part of CEDET, and started to install it here in MacOs, and “there” in my netbook.
or the trouble with hard-coded paths and ineffective menus.
Cross platform page-layout software:
Scribus. Now with more LaTeX
I am supposed to present a poster in a conference, about some work I am doing. I asked office mates about what they used… A Mac user suggested Pages, and I asked a more Linux oriented, LaTeX savvy, and he told me: forget about LaTeX and use some WYSIWYG program, you’ll save time and effort.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
When you are about to send a file to ArXiV, it greets you with the following confirmation message, just before the “Click here”:
Now Processing Submission
Read carefully the information below, recite aloud the English alphabet backwards starting from Z, breathe deeply, read carefully the information below once again, and then with a suitable pause (at least 10 seconds) you should
CLICK HERE TO CHECK STATUS
It made me lough quite a bit a few months ago :)
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Taken from Flickr
Sometimes I view mathematical knowledge as a desert. Full of sand, some pebbles, some rocks. You can get easily lost in this dry sea, but you can also find a place to stay and add. And now, I can say I have added my small grain of sand: An entire transcendental family with a persistent Siegel disc (link to the preprint version in ArXiV). My first article, now officially “Awaiting Editorial Assistant Processing”.
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Princeps Mathematicorum
Old 10 Deutsche Mark banknote. Gauss depicted along with a normal distribution and 5 historical buildings in Göttingen. The most visible, St. Jacobi’s Church (Jacobikirsche).
As you already know, I’m just in the middle of getting a thesis done. This means quite a lot of hand-written papers, full of definitions and on top of it all a lot of notational problems. I have quite a few similarly named spaces, with its corresponding norms… It is a mess.
When I had already proved my “first” theorem (in the thesis context, I mean… I have a paper soon to be published :), I started LaTeXing it.
I feel like I contributed something. I rewrote Wikipedia’s Siegel disk page, adding references and images. It is now quite dense… Ill have to re-read it to simplify it several times. Or someone else… Wikipedia’s wonders.
Snapshot! (Via Paparazzi!)
As I already did with Douady Rabbits, here is another dynamical plane, this time corresponding to a Siegel disk in an entire transcendental family in a parameter corresponding to a polynomial-like region.
Siegel disk in an ETF, available below as wallpaper
Siegel disk for desktop background 1280x800
Siegel disk for desktop background 1024x768
You can also buy a poster version here.
If you liked it, or have whatever else to say please leave a comment, digg, stumble or whatever you feel like doing.
Image from Flickr
Arrow’s impossibility theorem and related results
Background: Let K={A,B,C…} be a finite set of alternatives (maybe political parties), with more than 3 items. Let’s call transitive preference a way to sort all these elements, with draws possible. It’s just a funny name for a vote, in the more general sense as we can split our vote (Let A have 0.5, B 0.25 and C 0.25 of our vote).
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
Sometimes I feel like a character from a RPG (or NetHack), where you have a certain level and experience, and as you advance killing monsters, your experience points go up, your level eventually rises and your enemies turn harder.
I guess life (or at least a mathematician’s life while doing his thesis) is more or less like this… Enemies appear, you overcome them, and as you advance, they get stronger, bigger and thicker.
Softcover binding your own books is easier than you think
Bookbinding for dummies As of late, I have been printing quite a lot of long mathematical papers, and a few free pdf-books, or tutorials. And I wanted them properly bound, but didn’t want them so much as to pay for it. A few months ago, I found this tutorial on hardback binding. Although the tutorial, method and result are great, it is quite a lengthy effort.
Get arbitrary size fonts in LaTeX You have probably wondered how to get really big fonts in titles, or anywhere in a LaTeX document.
\usepackage{fix-cm} % Allows for Computer Modern fonts of arbitrary sizes
…
\fontsize{60}{70}\bfseries A SAMPLE
…
You are done. Easy, wasn’t it? You may also be interested in ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Latex,Linux)),5)
I have been experimenting with exponential-power potentials in my fractal images as of late, and by far the best results have been these. You can download it as a desktop wallpaper, hope you enjoy it. This Douady rabbit appears as a capture zone for a critical value in an exponential family.
Douady rabbit in an exponential family, available below as wallpaper
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1280x800
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1024x768
The first day, on our way to the Parador at Carmona (Sevilla, Spain) this is what we saw.
If you are printing a lot of… well, anything, sure you would love to make booklets out of what you print. If you happen to be a mathematician, you sure are printing lots of papers with more than 20 pages, which turn to 10 unmanageable pages when double-sided. But making a booklet allows you to turn them to just a little folded thing that you can read easier.
When printing in MacOSX you can print booklets, but they are supposed to be cut, not folded across as you would do to bind a book.
Two context-free grammars for a Merry Christmas. Rendered with Context Free
From 5 November to 9 November took place the (second) Fall School in Holomorphic Dynamics. Three fine speakers came (Walter Bergweiler, Agnieszka Badenska and Kari Astala), each one giving a course about a different topic in 3 sessions of one hour and a half. The only course I completed was the one Walter was giving, as it was the most interesting for me.
I talked on monday afternoon, but my talk was a mess.
Tag: memory
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
Cortesía de Shanidar
Puedes leer la versión inglesa de este post aquí: Learn to remember everything: the memory palace method
En este post os voy a enseñar cómo recordar a la perfección una lista. No importa la longitud de la lista: puede ser tu lista de la compra de 10 artículos, o una lista con 50, 100 o incluso 1000 cosas. Y en un próximo post, cómo aplicar este método para aprender idiomas.
Caveat: some of the links appearing in this post are affiliate links to Amazon.com If you buy anything from them, I get a small commission. As always, I only link to stuff I like. If you want to support (ever so slightly) this blog, buy something. If you don’t want, don’t do it ;)
Lately I’ve been watching an interesting TV series. Sherlock, the modern version of Conan Doyle’s stories and novels.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
This was posted to my mail newsletter a few months ago. Subscribe now if you want to receive this kind of content to your inbox. I won’t spam you, promise.
When do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can’t act upon them. While I’m falling asleep or while I’m taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I’ll remember it next morning, something that never happens.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.
I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?
From my cheap dictionary
Last February I set myself a goal for these next three months (February, March and April): to learn Gaelic. The time is up and I must confess I have not made a lot of advances. The reasons are plenty, and most are shared with whoever wants to learn a new language. They are even harder for people learning a few languages at once, the kind of language nerds that have way too many Teach Yourself books on languages.
An image can help your memory…
For how long?
This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.
In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages.
Tag: movies
What could I say about this movie? Definitely the best science fiction film of all time. A funny sentence Leon said Deckard before dying:
Leon:
My birthday is April 10, 2017. How long do I live?
Deckard:
Four years.
Leon:
More than you. Painful to live in fear, isn’t it? Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch.
Deckard:
Oh, I agree.
Leon:
Wake up! Time to die.
Tag: music
This has been a really tough week.
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
This week is Data+AI summit week.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
From morguefile
It’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.
But you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place.
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
Last Friday, 20, all SongsInCode’rs were asked to try to get #songsincode trending again to commemorate the 3 months anniversary of the idea. I submitted 3 songs (far less than my first outburst)… and almost no-one else tried to overwhelm twitter with his songs (a few did, and with great ideas ;)
KISS - know=“you cry”;know++=“Walk street beside her”; PassBy(); everybody: puts(“Looks good”); you: puts(“Strutter”); goto everybody;
Duran Duran - if(!
A few days ago I found a page via StumbleUpon, and caught my inner geek. Songs in code, a trend in twitter a few days ago. Other examples here, and here (twitter). Below my own creations.
(setq My ‘(sleeping)) - Roxette
do{love( );}while(TRUE); - The Beatles
while(1){puts(“Young”);} - Alphaville
love( ); puts(“Now”); - Roxette
do{ }while(b*tchslaprappin&&cocainetongue); - Guns N’ Roses
if(!say){say=MAXINT;} - Ronan Keating
int love=0; if(friday){love=1;} - The Cure
New: The previous version is rubbish! Just add your MP3 encoded files to iTunes library, select the entire album, choose get info from right-clicking it, go to the last tab (options) and select: Part of a compilation, remember position, skip when shuffling and in media type, Audibook. And you are done in a moment.
Time-wasting version by Google: This is just to remind myself how to do this simple thing. I got the information from here (via Google).
This weekend I bought three books:
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (Bill Evans: Vida y Obra), Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (Crónicas Marcianas) and The Lebanese Cookbook (a spanish edition). I have already finished Bradbury’s, I enjoyed it a lot. A masterpiece in science-fiction. In one of its short stories there is a poem by Lord Byron:
So we’ll go no more a roving
so late into the night
A few years ago, I was looking after some song lyrics (don’t remember exactly which song they belong to), and went into some of these web’s that give you “you may also like this” links. Well, I looked into the lyrics of “For Crying Out Loud”, by Meat Loaf (who I hadn’t heard about, ever). This are the lyrics, and as almost all Steinman’s-Meat Loaf songs, they are quite long. Just read the first few verses if you don’t feel like reading:
Tag: nanonote
Using Taskwarrior Instead Of Emacs+Org Mode For To-Do And Appointment Tracking
6 minutes read | 1189 words
One of my fractal images
I have a confession to make: I’m not using emacs+org mode to keep my to-do list and appointments. What? The same emacs junkie that used emacs for (almost) everything last December gave up emacs? Yes, the same, but only gave up for this use case. I have some good reasons about why I am using TaskWarrior. Which does not mean that I could not be using emacs for the same, I just wanted to try something new.
Yes, that’s me with a polariser.
Wait, playing Dungeon Crawl
in your Nanonote?
Installing Debian on the Ben is pretty easy after the work of the people at pyneo.org. I follow mostly their instructions which can befound here.
The first step is installing the package xburst-tools, following the instructions from the Qi Hardware Wiki about reflashing your Ben Nanonote.
The package can be downloaded in .deb format for Debian-like distributions.
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
Yacas is an advanced computer algebra system, with its own programming language and a lot of handful operators available.
It comes handy when you need to do that odd symbolic computation which is too big to handle by hand (or you are plain lazy).
By looking at the wikipedia entry, I discovered an startling truth: as of 2009, yacas is no longer maintained.
I should have guessed, because yacas does not compile out of the box (the program needed to generate the manuals does not compile), and this led to some naïve patching (just removing all instances of said program…).
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
Last saturday I was in a porting mood, and tackled two interesting packages to have in the Ben NanoNote: yacas and 4th.
Yacas (Yet Another Computer Algebra System) is a very interesting application to have in such a small device. The best calculator I have used is my old faithful HP49g. But in these days, it is bulky, heavy and slow. It was superseded by m48 (a HP48+ emulator) inside my iPod Touch.
Yes, you can! Adding colors to terminal output is possible. You already know it, from ls –color In this post I show you a script that does it, in a simple way. I don’t have a full range of colors implemented, but you can find all here.
This is the sed-processed output given by Gcal. The original source looks like
As you can see, I used as identifiers XML-like expressions.
The Ben NanoNote has very few applications, as of now. And one it has (among a few nice others), is Gcal. I didn’t know what Gcal was, and the Qi hardware wiki page on Gcal pointed me to this quite nice tutorial: The many uses of Gcal.
The tutorial is quite good, but somewhat long, and lacks a few specific examples, so I decided to write just what I read in that tutorial, mixed with the uses I am putting it to, so it is more a Gcal use cases than a full blown tutorial like that.
Screenshot compositing, made with free software
Since I bought the Nanonote, I have been finding new uses for it. Music player, note taker, voice recorder. I can also use it to start learning Python again, or Perl, which are (together with Lua) the languages currently installed by default.
After my first successful port (gnugo), I decided to try something else, and while idling at the train I thought that pMARS, the portable Memory Array Redcode Simulator was probably a good bet.
Since I bought the Ben NanoNote, I thought I needed to port something to it, as the biggest point with the NanoNote is developing to it, as its wiki says.
David Reyes, from Tuxbrain did a great work by porting gnuchess to the Nano and documenting it in his blog.
Of course, I want to port big things, but I’m not a great Linux guy, just average, so this tutorial makes a great starting point.
The Ben NanoNote: smaller than my wallet!
The Ben NanoNote: A computer smaller than my wallet If you are new here, have a look around and if you like what you find, don’t forget to subscribe.
Today I received by post my Ben NanoNote, from Tuxbrain. What is it? A palmtop computer, really small. It has also really small specs… small screen, small keyboard, little RAM, and so on.
Tag: nlp
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it… But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search.
Tag: obsidian
I have been using templates to add recurrent tasks to my daily journal in Obsidian.
A bit of Sunday-inspired yak shaving
Tag: open-source
I have been working on several personal projects lately. Basically scratching projects itching on my to do lists for several months. This is the first write up from them: templating without base repositories.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames (the successor of GraphX on Spark).
I ran into this problem with sbt dependency resolution around 7 weeks ago. I
was in a hurry, so I commented out the offending import (since it was not in the
subproject I was working on, so was not needed for the run I was in) sent my
commit to the heavens and CircleCI was happy.
Tag: origami
This is the notebook where I keep my to-do list, like the one you can see in the picture in Book Review: Do It Tomorrow. A quick and cheap way to have a small multi-page notebook you can keep always with you. Of course, calling this origami is a small lie, as you have to use scissors.
I read a very good post about going the analog way (How analog rituals can amp your productivity) and this was my tool.
A few weeks ago I saw in my Google Analytics that someone came to this blog looking for “Origami iPhone case”. As I have a Origami CD case, and several posts on iPhone/iPod Touch games… it was a page hit. But I thought: if I can have a neat CD case, I can also design a neat origami case for an iPhone! Said and… done. It took a few tries (and a few days), as you can see below.
One inbox to rule them all Since I started printing everything in A5 booklet format, more and more articles and printed stuff gets scattered over my desk, in this format. Which is really handy for reading and travelling, but not so much for piling over the desk.
A pile of inner stapled A5 is slightly womb… when there are more than 5 big documents stacked, it can easily fall. And I had several piles over my desktop: To read someday (better sooner than later), current references (papers I am using more than twice a week or so) and past references (the ones that were in the previous category but have not used in a while).
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
An English version of my diagrams for the origami flower-box Origami flower-box (Caja-Flor) diagrams, in English. Loosely based upon Kawasaki’s rose and a traditional japanese box. Click on the diagrams to get a bigger view of them. It appeared (Spanish version) on the Spanish Origami Association Bulletin, Second Volume, 2008. You can also take a look at my easy origami CD case.
It will look like this when finished, closed and opened.
A few years ago I was looking for an origami CD case. I found this site (which uses Tom Hull’s design). Although it is a quick and neat design for an origami case, I don’t like it, it feels like the CD is about to fall. So I tweaked for a while, and came up with this design. It takes a little longer to fold, but holds really firm, and looks nicer after.
Browsing old posts in Origami Tessellations, I found out about Joel Cooper’s origami masks. Here are a few examples taken from these two web pages.
They are really amazing… I hope I can learn how to do that. I’ll have to start learning something about origami tessellations, which is a thing I’ve always skipped.
Kamiya Satoshi’s Pegasus, folded from a square from A4 standard paper (21x21 cm square). The model is about 8 cm long. Satoshi suggests 25x25 paper, which obviously must be thinner than 80g/m^2. But the model itself is wonderful, although my rendition of may not be worth of it.
PS: Shame on me, for not rendering the head as it must be done (à la Dave Brill’s horse). Well, next time, with bigger paper :)
As you may already know, I enjoy a lot drawing. I usually draw with some kind of mechanical pencil, of HB strength (or one for film writing which is stronger than 3H). As I try to improve the quality of my drawings, I begin to wonder if I really like to draw really well. Yes, I’d like to be able to draw perfect faces, but probably I’ll be as happy being able to sketch a face that looks like the original one.
Tag: p5js
Here are the details about how my procedural sketch Iris works. This has been one of the fastest and most enjoyable sketches I have created lately
If you have been paying attention, you may have seen me talk about p5js and generative art lately. Here is a break-down of the why and how.
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
Some details of my p5js sketch Blot/Painting
Generative art using p5.js
Tag: piano
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
Tag: pkm
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Tag: places
This is a picture I shot in Iceland, in the Dynjandi Waterfall. If a caption is needed, it would be Never give up. Click the thumbnails to download the high resolution images.
Dynjandi Waterfalls
I have not set any download tracking, thus I don’t know if you are downloading these: Please, if you download one of these wallpapers, please leave a comment in the form below!
If you like this wallpaper, please share in StumbleUpon or Twitter.
Today I am leaving on holiday… Destination: Iceland. It is funny, because we arranged everything (accomodation, car rental and such) just two weeks before Eyjafjallajökull started spitting ash. It have been a few months wondering whether we could make it to Iceland and come back… Fortunately the little volcano took a pause and here we go.
I have a few scheduled posts for this few weeks (I’ll be back around 16th July) but I will be again posting more frequently after I am back.
København, Denmark
Related posts:
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
While on Paris, I spotted several Space Invaders. Sadly, I wasn’t aware enough, as there are plenty.
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Here are some pictures and images which look pretty good together with my Fluxbox configuration, in my Netbook. Here they are for your enjoyment. They are supposed to be small, not to drain too many system resources. I will upload later the butterfly in higher resolution.
You may also be interested in
Two weeks, still loving Fluxbox Three dee Acer Aspire One 8.9' + Ubuntu + Fluxbox Whistle control your computer (Linux&Mac)
Last weekend we had a quick trip (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) to Madrid. Being a Barcelona lover, I thought I would hate the city. I was amazed after walking over there, having a look at all the monuments and museums (the tourist thing), and then going for dinner and supper, some tapas and a beer. Madrid surprised us with this… in Barcelona is quite hard to find a cheap and good place to eat… or not so cheap, but not tourist focused.
Tag: plan9
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Note: It’s best to open the videos in full screen. Also I have added a few line breaks or readability in the code snippets that will make them not work correctly. It’s not hard to find where they are, if you run into any problems let me know.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been using Acme and related Plan 9 from User Space utilities lately. One of its pieces is the plumber.
Tag: planning
The dbt issue
Tag: postscript
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
For those of you who don’t know, PostScript is a programming language (and also the name of the type of files you write in this language) used as a way to define what a page looks like. A PostScript file contains instructions which create text, or draw images, and these instructions can do quite a lot of work. PostScript is directly processed by almost all laser printers, and if you are a Linux or MacOs user you already have some mean to process and open it.
Tag: processing
Some details of my p5js sketch Blot/Painting
Generative art using p5.js
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
Tag: product
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
Tag: productivity
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Trust between business stakeholders and engineering (and data, analytics, operations…) teams is a tricky matter.
Meetings galore.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
I have been using templates to add recurrent tasks to my daily journal in Obsidian.
Back on track.
This is a light edition.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
I had a very entertaining week.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
This is a short edition.
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
My girlfriend likes to joke/complain that I have more keyboards than hands. And indeed, I have probably a dozen or so different keyboards, most of them bluetooth. But, I have found the best one for the day-to-day work (sadly it is not bluetooth). It is a Gergo.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
This is how I handle the dreaded GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review when using Things 3.
Down into some net rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a review of Work Clean. I chuckled: a productivity book, philosophizing about how cook’s approach to preparation (mise en place) would fix all our problems? Bring it on, I have a long commute.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
A few weeks ago I found out the awesome time tracking setup that Sacha Chua has in her homepage. Although I’m a regular at her blog and I follow her RSS feed, I had not seen it “live” yet. My inner geek yelled “gimme gimme” and I asked her what mobile software is she using for time tracking. Sadly (well, sadly), it is Android only app. Oh well. I don’t want another device.
This was posted to my mail newsletter a few months ago. Subscribe now if you want to receive this kind of content to your inbox. I won’t spam you, promise.
When do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can’t act upon them. While I’m falling asleep or while I’m taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I’ll remember it next morning, something that never happens.
Snickerdoodles!
Do you have problems to keep motivated? Is your usual to-do list filled with great hopes of accomplishing 20 things? Do you dump it when you are wasted at 11 AM after finishing just the first 5 things? Of course, you are not alone. This is a very common thing, from freelancers to researchers, or to almost anyone managing their own time. But this can be due to eating radishes instead of chocolate chip cookies.
Yesterday I did nothing. Absolutely, really nothing.
And it felt great. Before yesterday, my usual weekend was filled of what I thought was doing nothing, but far from it. I wrote posts, programmed, read a lot online and caught up with what was going in the A-List Blogger Club forum. Did some laundry, folded the clothes. All this (well, except for the laundry part) under the assumption that doing what you love does not tire you.
Since I can remember, I’ve always tried to bite more than I could chew. Every time I’m stressed, or overworked I end up adding one or two new projects. I don’t know how. I try to pick up a new language, or start to play go again, or decide it is a good moment to learn stenography. These days, for example, added to my usual schedule are a new blog about meditation, I finally started the series on our road trip to Iceland and I am fighting my schedule to learn Gaelic.
This is the notebook where I keep my to-do list, like the one you can see in the picture in Book Review: Do It Tomorrow. A quick and cheap way to have a small multi-page notebook you can keep always with you. Of course, calling this origami is a small lie, as you have to use scissors.
I read a very good post about going the analog way (How analog rituals can amp your productivity) and this was my tool.
From morguefile
It’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.
But you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place.
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
You can check the challenge updates below:
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
This week I’ll be in a workshop on Complex Dynamics in Warsaw, and will present a poster titled Approximating bifurcation loci by zeros of functions. This is heavily based on a poster I presented last year in Copenhagen (titled Sets approximating regions of instability). The underlying work in progress has changed quite a bit since then, but this does not show in the poster. I just solve some problems in the exposition, from the questions I got back then.
Lately my pile of papers to read has been growing steadily, and I’ve done very little to read all that stuff marked with “will read someday”. It had to come to an end, and it did with my previous Task Bankruptcy.
Reading research papers can be a huge waste of time… Or end up in forming big piles of To be read someday. The problem is, usually someday never means today.
Office mess. Yes.
That’s a Julia set in my wall
A pile of papers to read on the side. A stack of notes for several unrelated projects. Assignments to prepare. Questions to answer by email. Inbox full of unclassified mails. Lectures to prepare. Cluttered office desktop. Cluttered computer desktop.
A few weeks ago, Friday, this was what I saw when I looked at my office desktop. And I decided it was too much to bear and filed my first Task Bankruptcy.
From Yassin Hassan@Flickr
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One may say that to be a winner you have to be disciplined, commited, hard-worker, have a thirst for the win. But what a winner has almost always behind are countless failures, terrible defeats and fatal blunders.
The topic for this post has been jumping on and off from my mind for a few weeks, and what prompted me to finally write it was a very recent post by Gabriel Weinberg, web entrepeneur and CEO of the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought any app through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying any app and the review was unfaithful to the application.
Hey! Look! A squirrel!
GillesGonthier@Flickr
A few weeks ago I realised I was procrastinating too much. I tend to work in cycles, and it looked like my productive cycle was over and my procrastinator half had just kicked in the worse possible moment: lectures had just begun.
It looked like there was no solution. My timeboxing strategies went nowhere, will-do lists (litemind.com) had no real meaning, carrot-and-stick solutions didn’t work.
Stairs to Macchu Pichu,
courtesy of Shanidar
I just realised why I procrastinate in some tasks. And it may also be why you do, read on! It is not because they are boring, hard or repetitive. They may be. Hard tasks are a measure of your strength, boring and repetitive tasks, of your stamina. No, the problem is another.
Some projects are just tombstones. There are certain huge projects, with hardness and boredom along the way that when they are done, they are dead.
Two weeks ago it was the beginning of this years lectures. Currently I’m solving problems in the blackboard, 2 hours per week and take care of one computer lab (programming in C, but they have already done a C programming course and another course of numerical computations with C), all for our Numerical Analysis course (7th semester). This is the same schedule I had 3 years ago, also last year I had one computer lab each semester.
What? Biology and time management? Limiting factors? Okay, take it easy. First, let’s read this Wikipedia entry:
A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population, size, or distribution. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rainforest, where growth is limited to all plants in the understory unless more light becomes available.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought this book through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying the book and the review was unfaithful to the book.
A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
A month ago, Oscar del Ben posted an interesting tip in his blog to take power naps when you are feeling tired, How to Get a Quick 5-10 Minutes Nap Without Using an Alarm Clock. His idea is simple: pick a spoon on your hand. Once you fall asleep, your grip will relax, the spoon falls and you awaken with the sound. I found it amusing and interesting, as I am one of those types who feel really well after a 10 minutes nap.
Three months ago Oscar Del Ben posted an interesting post in his blog, FreestyleMind. In it he said that he saved (quite) a lot of money and a lot of back pain with a special office chair: he uses a gym ball.
The gym ball in question is the one used in yoga or Pilates training. They come in two sizes, 65 cm 75cm (diameter). I had recurring back pain, and decided to give it a try at home.
Don’t miss the latest posts Learn to Remember Everything: The memory palace technique or Remembering Facts: USING Mental associative chains
If you are an avid self-improvement reader, you know already what timeboxing is. But maybe you don’t harness all its potential For the rest, timeboxing is a time management technique focused on time spent, not tasks done. Therefore, you will need to set aside some project tracking system to have a clear idea of what you are working on.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
Life logging, journaling… what now? The idea behind this post grew from an insight I had, two months ago. I realised that I was bookmarking a lot of web pages because I liked what they explained and wanted to remember what I read. More precisely, I wanted to remember that I had read that. At that time, this seemed the more natural way to approach this problem.
A month later, more or less, I landed in this New York times article: The Data-Driven Life.
Music to listen with this post: Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsvkii’s Concert 35 D-major, Allegro (Spotify link , Youtube link). I’ll write why this piece in a forthcoming post.
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A week and a half ago, @nochiel, a twitter follower retweeted the following, initially written by @marcoarment (lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper):
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. Everyone knows it, fundamentals are fundamental. It’s like saying water is wet, isn’t it? But again and again the greatest teachers of hard disciplines remind us that we need to master the fundamentals to become the best.
Vince Lombardi, said it:
Fundamentals win it. Football is two things; it’s blocking and tackling. I don’t care about formations or new defences or tricks on defence. If you block and tackle better than the team you’re playing, you’ll win.
Introducing LeechBlock
You arrive to your office. Quickly check urgent mails, close the mail program and browser and put a nice solid hour, hour and a half, even two straight hours of work. Then decide that you deserve a break, and maybe with a fresh cup of coffee from the coffee machine you decide to browse idly for a few minutes. And then a co-worker knocks at your door and asks if you are coming to lunch.
The ‘broken windows theory’ is a widely known theory, based on folks knowledge (which have been also tested in real life).
Consider a building with a broken window. If this window does not get repaired, other windows can break (over time, or by vandalism). In the long run, someone may break into the building, becoming a squatter.
Or a more usual situation. If some litter gets accumulated in a sidewalk or a lot, soon more litter will accumulate, until people start leaving whole bags of trash.
It is a widely accepted theory that the use of tools determined the development of the human brain. Nowadays, using tools is thus a quite common endeavor everybody does.
But ask a carpenter if he would use a jagged saw, or a draftsman a broken pencil. It is not only using the tools, but using the best tools.
But what is for the best tools? Using the best possible tools is not enough: you need to love your tools.
The pleasure and pain of time management In this post I’ll review some time management systems to get the most out of your workday. Of course, keep in mind that you also should have rest time.
Start strong Start your day doing some work for at least half an hour straight. You can do this at home, before leaving yo your office (if you usually spend at least 1h between getting up and leaving) or just on arriving to your office.
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Two and a half weeks ago, I got a netbook and promptly installed Ubuntu, followed by Fluxbox (as already explained). And after two weeks of almost continued use, I like it even more than when I decided to use it. Some of the points I really enjoy (in no particular order).
Strong keyboard shortcuts. As an emacs junkie as I am, I love keyboard shortcuts. And Fluxbox is incredibly flexible in defining or removing them: Even system-wide shortcuts are customizable.
I have been using several productivy enhancers (or time-wasting avoiders) as of late. Although I find them quite useful, I wonder if I could find something even better.
Think: I have already talked about think elsewhere. Think enables the user to focus on just one application, seeing nothing more. It is like the blinders of a horse to keep you from distracting.
LeechBlock: A FireFox addon, which allows you to block certain sites at certain times of the week, or after a predetermined amount of time has been wasted there.
There are a few Mac applications I use so often, I couldn’t live without them. And most of them are free, or really kind shareware.
Caffeine: Keep your Mac from sleeping.
Carbon Emacs (F): Well, this is cross-platform. And you know, I can’t live without it. Plus, Carbon Emacs has some nifty additions. Check it out!
Disk Inventory X (F): Shows graphically the size of files sitting in your drives.
I have finally finished (duh!) reading a book on shorthand (stenography) focused on the catalan language. It is a book by Josep Cormand, “Estudi de fonologia bàsica : Mètode d’escriptura ràpida”, ISBN 84-218-0320-4. It is based in a method developed by professor Dalmau, based on catalan fonology. Once you are able to write in this way, you enjoy it more and more, is quite an interesting feeling. Although I find re-reading what I wrote a pain… I have written a lot more than read, thus I am still far from being proficient at it.
For about a year I’ve been procrastinating a lot, and lately I decided it was time to end. To do so, I kept on procrastinating (avoiding my work) to research the web for causes, cures and pitfalls in this “disease”. In the following entry I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned (slightly condensed), hope it serves you too. Keep in mind it is a long post, bookmark it now if you can’t keep reading for this long (or use it to avoid working for about half an hour :) I will only cover the aspects of causes (and related cures) and related time management systems, but for now I will skip motivation, leaving it for another post, as I’m still thinking about it.
Tag: programming
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Change the parameters of a docker container without knowing the docker run command used
3 minutes read | 466 words
I’m not sure how useful this Docker “trick” is, since it happens in a very niche situation.
At work, we have several instances running a suite of Docker containers, with some non-trivial amount of environment variables, port configurations, volumes and links among them. This is set up really easily using ansible: writing link/port/volume mappings in ansible (using the docker, container or docker-container modules, depending how long ago we set it up).
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
A few weeks ago I started trying a pre-beta release of Dyalog APL (now available as “full beta”) for Mac. Fellow Mac users, looks like we are in for a treat after so much time of only having GNU APL and the pretty expensive APLX. Now Mac APL lovers, users and aficionados will have a competitive, commercial option. At last!
I started with the usual 1+1, ⍳ 10 , ⍴ ⍳ 10 to check it worked as expected.
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
Text editors. You hate them or love them. Praise them with religious zeal, and attack them with the same power. I’ve been an emacs user for the last 8 years, getting as deep as I could without checking the source. And the past few months I have started using evil-mode in emacs, to get some taste of vim in my daily editing (mostly text objects.)
There’s still a third contestant in editor-land, for me.
The links to Practical Vim are affiliate links to Amazon. Beware!
So… last January I was in a flight to London, preparing for an intense, 12 days course on traditional shoemaking (English hand-welted shoes, improving our knowledge at The Fancy Puffin.) And my flight read was Practical Vim. Most of my readers are already aware I’m an emacs guy, so the main question is why?
I love knowing many tools.
If you want to read a quick overview of this in Spanish, check my post about GTM at DoctorMetrics.
Google has just unveiled a new tool: Google Tag Manager. I have spent a few hours playing with it (both before and after official release.) And it’s awesome! Or at least, it has quite a lot of awesomeness, hidden behind a seemingly simple interface.
Its main feature is the fact that you can get away with just a piece of included code.
Version Control: Started using git and github (and how to set-up a remote git server)
2 minutes read | 363 words
It’s been almost 6 years since I used some kind of version control system. Back then I wasn’t sure about which I wanted to use… I settled with RCS, the father of them all. RCS was structurally simple, with text-based (human-readable) delta files. I liked that. I had all my code and TeX files under revision control, but then I started using more than one computer and it got out of hand quickly (using RCS or CVS in Windows was quite tricky and had user and encoding problems.)
Sensitive information blanked
The gnusnotes.el package, with delete and edit capabilities is now available in the marmalade package repository. This post just explains why, how and what (code at the end, too)
Last month I switched email clients (for the 4th time in the past year.) I’ve passed through gnus, Thunderbird, mail.app and settled with Sparrow. Just 2 days before Sparrow was bought by Google I left for gnus (lucky moment!
From Flickr
No, this is not a tutorial (but I do have written the standard steps to learn below). I began learning to juggle very recently. I just want to answer a possible “why”?
I’ve always been fascinated by juggling, and every time I wanted to eat more than 2 small oranges I’d try my hand at juggling them. Always followed by bowing and picking them from the ground, of course.
Note from 2020: The domain mentioned in the post is no longer active (or mine at least), I cancelled this project some time ago
Last week I wrote about ~whatlanguageis.com~, my first simple try at creating a Django powered site. How did it came to be?
In the last few months have been writing and thinking about several ideas to process social data with Python, undoubtedly motivated by the great book Mining the Social Web.
Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it… But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search.
Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
Yes, that’s me with a polariser.
Wait, playing Dungeon Crawl
in your Nanonote?
Installing Debian on the Ben is pretty easy after the work of the people at pyneo.org. I follow mostly their instructions which can befound here.
The first step is installing the package xburst-tools, following the instructions from the Qi Hardware Wiki about reflashing your Ben Nanonote.
The package can be downloaded in .deb format for Debian-like distributions.
And e/2 Appears from Nowhere! (Follow up to 'And e Appears from Nowhere')
3 minutes read | 464 words
You may remember a post I wrote a month ago titled And e Appears from Nowhere. It was based (through some blogs I read) on a footnote from Prime Obsession(Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly. Select a random number between 0 and 1. Now select another and add it to the first. Keep doing this, piling on random numbers.
A month ago, Oscar del Ben posted an interesting tip in his blog to take power naps when you are feeling tired, How to Get a Quick 5-10 Minutes Nap Without Using an Alarm Clock. His idea is simple: pick a spoon on your hand. Once you fall asleep, your grip will relax, the spoon falls and you awaken with the sound. I found it amusing and interesting, as I am one of those types who feel really well after a 10 minutes nap.
I have a problem: I know quite a lot different programming languages (you can read my list of the best 9 books I have read about programming), but I am proficient only in two. I’d love to choose a few to concentrate and build my skills up, but I don’t know which. Read on for background and possible candidates.
Since I discovered there were different programming languages, I’ve liked learning different ones.
As I posted in Best Posts I Have Read in June and July, I liked a lot a numerical experiment in Re: Factor, a blog about learning the Factor programming language. The idea comes from another blog, this time about Clojure (a Lisp dialect running in the Java Virtual Machine), based on a footnote from Prime Obsession (Amazon affiliate link) by John Derbyshire. The footnote reads:
Here is an example of e turning up unexpectedly.
While I was in Iceland, I started to see visits coming to my blog from www.hanselminutes.com… A site I didn’t know about. As soon as I got a decent wifi coverage I went to see what it was about… And it was a podcast!
From his own description,
Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
The 100 most common words in Icelandic, automatically generated from Wikipedia
3 minutes read | 556 wordsThe file can be downloaded at the end of the post
As you may already know, I’m travelling to Iceland this July, and started learning Icelandic a few months ago. It advances slowly but firmly, but I found a problem:when you are self-learning a new language, an invaluable tool is a list of most common words.
Today, while I was thinking of the best implementation solution for the vector operations, I realised that I am just not motivated by writing a raytracer in Forth. I’ll have to find something more interesting, or at least, more Forth minded to work on.
If I want to raytrace, better to improve the Lisp raytracer, which is sitting idly in my Code/Lisp folder. Steps that will follow in the raytracer path:
Yes, I know it: it is easy. But I will be doing a wipe and reinstall of my MacBook, and when I need to reinstall everything I want a place to check for the steps I did. I found almost all tips needed here.
The first step is checking for Mercurial (wikipedia) in your system. Open a terminal and type
hg version
If your terminal complains about command not found, you don’t have Mercurial installed.
Below you can find a non exhaustive list of the best programming books I have read so far. I have read a lot more books about programming, but most of them I read and promptly forgot about them. I am reading currently a few more (Code Complete, Thinking Forth), and maybe they can make it into a list like this that my future self writes.
And now, the list of the best programming books I have read so far.
Screenshot compositing, made with free software
Since I bought the Nanonote, I have been finding new uses for it. Music player, note taker, voice recorder. I can also use it to start learning Python again, or Perl, which are (together with Lua) the languages currently installed by default.
After my first successful port (gnugo), I decided to try something else, and while idling at the train I thought that pMARS, the portable Memory Array Redcode Simulator was probably a good bet.
As I promised in my previous post reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer, here I collect 8 reader reasons for re-inventing the wheel from comments on the reddit thread and on page comments. They are in no particular order AFAIK.
You need a faster wheel: Embedded software is the prime example of such. Average 10 cycles, worst case 15 cycles is not good when your system can explode if you do not attain 14 cycles at most.
Since I bought the Ben NanoNote, I thought I needed to port something to it, as the biggest point with the NanoNote is developing to it, as its wiki says.
David Reyes, from Tuxbrain did a great work by porting gnuchess to the Nano and documenting it in his blog.
Of course, I want to port big things, but I’m not a great Linux guy, just average, so this tutorial makes a great starting point.
Stochastic hill climbing: Sisyphus pushes an image Last year, Slashdot published this interesting piece of work: Genetic evolution of the Mona Lisa. The idea is to approximate an image by a certain number of semitransparent polygons, randomly chosen. I liked very much the idea, and as every year I try to come up with some Christmas postcard related to maths or programming I gave it a try. So I wrote a LISP version… way too slow.
Has someone ever told you “Don’t re-invent the wheel”? Again and again I read somewhere around the net that ’re-inventing the wheel' is one of the worse errors a programmer can fall into. In fact, I’ve read it so often that the only thought of doing it makes me re-think over and over other ways of solving (or ignoring) the problem.
But here, I advocate my pro’s (the cons can be found elsewhere) for re-inventing the wheel, or at least not being frightened of it.
The Ben NanoNote: smaller than my wallet!
The Ben NanoNote: A computer smaller than my wallet If you are new here, have a look around and if you like what you find, don’t forget to subscribe.
Today I received by post my Ben NanoNote, from Tuxbrain. What is it? A palmtop computer, really small. It has also really small specs… small screen, small keyboard, little RAM, and so on.
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m on my way to learn forth, and to do so, rewrite my Lispy raytracer into a.. Forthy raytracer. Of course, the first steps are deciding on some implementation ideas.
I decided to allocate a few global variables (for “current point”, “current vector”, “light source”, etc), to avoid too much clutter in the stack. This way it will be cleaner, maybe even cleaner than my Lisp version.
After following a twitter feed about programming, I got overwhelmed by FORTH related posts. I had already read something about forth before (stack-based, somewhat fast, good for embedded devices), but so many bit.ly links pointing to webs of implementations of FORTH and FORTH things made me decide to, well, take a deeper look.
Looks like a nice language, having something I enjoy about Lisp (interactivity) and something I like about PostScript (stack based).
The easiest way to debug: valgrind with the most powerful text editor: emacs A few days ago my office mate told me about the great debugging tool known as valgrind. Before I have been using the great pairing of emacs+gdb to debug segmentation faults and memory leaks… Now I would never use gdb for this. Moreover, I found a way to somewhat use it from within a shell in emacs to allow fast error browsing.
Maybe you remember my previous post about detection of copied assignments? Well, now I can say it succeeded. CJuicer is a flex script, generating a lexycal analyzer with a rudimentary parser of C code, it outputs a PostScript with the “logical tree” of loops, function calls and conditionals. Same trees, copied assignment (unless it is simple code, then almost everyone writes the same), without problems with changing names of variables. Thus it could beat diff.
From flickr
A few months ago, I realised I was checking some pages frequently for changes. They were some congress pages, and I was waiting for them to add information about registration and such.
Then I realised I could write a script to do it, using diff and wget. You can get it below. You have to edit it to add the pages you want to follow, then run it with the “write” option to download the first version, then edit your crontab file (crontab -e) to run it every day at a specified time with the “diff” option.
Using emacs on the go in your iPod Touch / iPhone Maybe you remember a previous post on installing vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for the iPod Touch. I did it just for the geek factor… and for being able to edit things with Emacs. I have emacs installed:
But what’s the use of emacs, without files to edit? It didn’t bother me… at first. Keep on reading for how to keep in sync files edited inside the vMac emacs and files in your Linux box, along with the “why should I use emacs in my iPod/iPhone?
If you liked it, leave a comment, digg, stumble
or whatever you feel like doing
Stochastic hill-climbing algorithm to approximate a picture by triangles (algorithm and source code). This image contains 48 images out of 1000, from iterating for 11000 generations the evolution code. The source image is the last square in the tile set.
Bon Nadal!
Feliz Navidad!
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Nöel!
Buon Natale!
Frohe Weihnachten!
Mutlu Noeller!
With GIMP’s “Map to sphere”
A few years ago, while I was still mainly a Windows user, I read ‘Pragmatic programmer: From journeyman to master’, and learnt about Version Control Systems. You know, SVN, CVS, Git, Darcs. As I was just a single user working locally (just wanted the incremental and logged backups), I installed RCS. Almost the oldest, and in some sense the most simple. It can work locally, just with a file of delta (text added from one revision to the next) which is a plain text, human readable file.
Lena Söderberg
I am working in my free time in an image processing related program, and this made me remember when I was taking a course in Signal Processing. One of the standard test images was the one above. Where does this historical image processing snippet come from?
Turns out (wikipedia link) it is a standard folklore image, dating back to the seventies, when a bunch of electrical engineers needed an image satisfying certain signal problems (it is, indeed, an image with a lot of significative details, when compressing, denoising or whatever: the hat, the uniform colour distribution except for a few patches of different color…).
A LISP random triangle generator. Also wrote a C version.
As I said in a previous post, I am looking for some way to detect copied code. I have now a working prototype of a “code juicer”. From a C file it creates a set of PostScript files (well, almost, as they need postprocessing) which are later processed and selected to print. As an example, here is the output applied to a Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 4-5.
It is something like an execution tree, with function calls squared, and different slopes for if, for, while clauses.
Last Friday, 20, all SongsInCode’rs were asked to try to get #songsincode trending again to commemorate the 3 months anniversary of the idea. I submitted 3 songs (far less than my first outburst)… and almost no-one else tried to overwhelm twitter with his songs (a few did, and with great ideas ;)
KISS - know=“you cry”;know++=“Walk street beside her”; PassBy(); everybody: puts(“Looks good”); you: puts(“Strutter”); goto everybody;
Duran Duran - if(!
From The Design of the Emacs Logo
I guess you may already know I love the emacs text editor, and use it as often as I can to do almost everything I can with it. I even use it in my iPod touch, through minivMac. But there is a small niche where it was a pain: quick editing a file from the command line. Those times when you just want to open one file, change a line, save and close.
Pieces of an ENIGMA machine, from Flickr
Assume you have a set of alumni, which are due an individual programming assignment. All have the same assignment (as it is hard to come up with several), and it is hard enough that copying from each other passes for everyone’s mind. As a teacher, how do you detect this?
From my point of view, there are fundamentally two different kinds of copy:
A few days ago I found a page via StumbleUpon, and caught my inner geek. Songs in code, a trend in twitter a few days ago. Other examples here, and here (twitter). Below my own creations.
(setq My ‘(sleeping)) - Roxette
do{love( );}while(TRUE); - The Beatles
while(1){puts(“Young”);} - Alphaville
love( ); puts(“Now”); - Roxette
do{ }while(b*tchslaprappin&&cocainetongue); - Guns N’ Roses
if(!say){say=MAXINT;} - Ronan Keating
int love=0; if(friday){love=1;} - The Cure
Emacs fun, in other words. This weekend I’m writing some programs in C, to review major problems before my students ask. Yesterday I finished the part due Wednesday (for them), and today I tackled the final part. But there is some bug somewhere… I always miss on such matrix-here-matrix-there-solve-that.
Today, after battling for an hour, I realized I missed the “intellisense” part of CEDET, and started to install it here in MacOs, and “there” in my netbook.
CicleImatges()
Source code:
// Copyright 2009 Rubén Berenguel
// ruben /at/ maia /dot/ ub /dot/ es
// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
// published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of
// the License, or (at your option) any later version.
// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
These days I’ve been busy programming a version of Lavaurs algorithm for the idenfication of circle chords: the abstract Mandelbrot set.
The images don’t look like much, but the output of the program is nicer: it outputs an Encapsulated PostScript file which looks sharper. But when converting to png with ImageMagick some distortion appeared.
Lavaurs chords, depth 13 cutoff
Lavaurs chords, depth 5
Lavaurs chords, depth 13
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Last monday I bought an Acer Aspire One, 8.9', with an extra 6-cell battery and 15 minutes later I installed Ubuntu (Netbook Remix version) on it, and after realizing everything was working smoothly (except for the SD card reader… anyway, I have an external device for doing so) I installed the Fluxbox window manager. New: You may also be interested in Two weeks: still loving Fluxbox.
Here you can see the FluxBox Root menu, Conky in the “desktop”
As I already did with Douady Rabbits, here is another dynamical plane, this time corresponding to a Siegel disk in an entire transcendental family in a parameter corresponding to a polynomial-like region.
Siegel disk in an ETF, available below as wallpaper
Siegel disk for desktop background 1280x800
Siegel disk for desktop background 1024x768
You can also buy a poster version here.
If you liked it, or have whatever else to say please leave a comment, digg, stumble or whatever you feel like doing.
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
Stephen Wolfram (owner of Wolfram Research) has released (after announcing it in March) Wolfram Alpha, a kind of web search aimed at natural language and intelligent answers. JME pointed me to this question:
Taken from Wolfram Alpha
The strange thing about it is that is is fully written in Mathematica (or so they say, 5 million lines of code). Strange indeed, Mathematica isn’t a particularly fast or “comfy” programming language.
There are a few Mac applications I use so often, I couldn’t live without them. And most of them are free, or really kind shareware.
Caffeine: Keep your Mac from sleeping.
Carbon Emacs (F): Well, this is cross-platform. And you know, I can’t live without it. Plus, Carbon Emacs has some nifty additions. Check it out!
Disk Inventory X (F): Shows graphically the size of files sitting in your drives.
Today I found some nice “gadget” to add to my browser. TiddlyWiki.
It is a single html document you download, and save. And it behaves (locally, in your computer!) just as a wiki. Creating links, adding things, whatever you like. Use it like a blog, wiki, recipe book, sketchpage, whatever you like. All gets saved in the same html file you downloaded (advise: change its name).
Wikipedia page.
TiddlyWiki home.
I have been experimenting with exponential-power potentials in my fractal images as of late, and by far the best results have been these. You can download it as a desktop wallpaper, hope you enjoy it. This Douady rabbit appears as a capture zone for a critical value in an exponential family.
Douady rabbit in an exponential family, available below as wallpaper
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1280x800
Douady rabbit for desktop background 1024x768
For those of you who don’t know, PostScript is a programming language (and also the name of the type of files you write in this language) used as a way to define what a page looks like. A PostScript file contains instructions which create text, or draw images, and these instructions can do quite a lot of work. PostScript is directly processed by almost all laser printers, and if you are a Linux or MacOs user you already have some mean to process and open it.
Tag: psychology
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
Tag: pybcn
Back on track.
Tag: python
A new entry on the data papers series. Ray is a distributed framework for next generation AI applications. What does this mean? A scam? Blockchain on AI? Nah, it’s actually pretty cool, it has actors.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
This turned out a long one
The dbt issue
Next week I’m on holidays!
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Christmas edition!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Back on track.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
I had a very entertaining week.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.
I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian. I may write the reasons at some point, stay 🐟.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
The video edition
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
After my happy experience with Haskell rewriting the ticketiser from Python to Haskell, I moved next on my list of rewrites.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
This is a project recap on writing some non-super-trivial Haskell for the first time.
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
A D3 sitemap using force layout and a web worker. This will come to bear-note-graph at some point (and other projects)
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
These probably qualify as the most one weird trick I have figured out this year.
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
I have been working on several personal projects lately. Basically scratching projects itching on my to do lists for several months. This is the first write up from them: templating without base repositories.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
Around a year ago (give or take a few months), I was talking with a coworker about context managers, and a question arose: could you use a context manager to measure elapsed time? I stashed the question away, and created a project Timing Context Manager, which I actively ignored for many months. New year, new me, and a conversation with Marc Ramírez moved me to unblock some of my old projects. This was the easiest project I had in Python, so I moved it to active.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random bits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this week, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
Heavy focus on Python’s asyncio this week. Also, one of the best books of the
year.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
A few days go I played a bit with a naive implementation of Bloom
filters in Python. I wanted to time
them against just checking whether a field is in a set/collection. I found
something slightly puzzling: it looked like the in worked too fast for
smaller lists. And I wondered: maybe small lists are special internally, and
allow for really fast lookups? Maybe they have some internal index? This raised
the question: how does in find stuff in sequences?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.
At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year
Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.
Note from 2020: The domain mentioned in the post is no longer active (or mine at least), I cancelled this project some time ago
Last week I wrote about ~whatlanguageis.com~, my first simple try at creating a Django powered site. How did it came to be?
In the last few months have been writing and thinking about several ideas to process social data with Python, undoubtedly motivated by the great book Mining the Social Web.
Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it… But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search.
Tag: qgis
I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
Tag: ray
A new entry on the data papers series. Ray is a distributed framework for next generation AI applications. What does this mean? A scam? Blockchain on AI? Nah, it’s actually pretty cool, it has actors.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
Tag: readings
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
This turned out a long one
Meetings galore.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
The dbt issue
Next week I’m on holidays!
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
Happy new year!
Christmas edition!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Back on track.
This is a light edition.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
I had a very entertaining week.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
Next week I start a new job 😮
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.
I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian. I may write the reasons at some point, stay 🐟.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
Sweet, sweet holidays.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
The video edition
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
The last of 2020.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
This is a short edition.
Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with 400+ articles. I “trimmed” it down to “only” 380 during this week, I had a lot of airport time due to going to Spark Summit Europe to give a talk.
Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random bits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this week, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
Heavy focus on Python’s asyncio this week. Also, one of the best books of the
year.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Tag: readingsoftheweek
Spent a week in Switzerland… and on the flight back caught COVID.
Shit ain’t gettin' better.
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
This turned out a long one
Meetings galore.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
The dbt issue
Next week I’m on holidays!
RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
Happy new year!
Christmas edition!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Back on track.
This is a light edition.
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
I had a very entertaining week.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
Next week I start a new job 😮
This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
This week is Data+AI summit week.
Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).
Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.
I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian. I may write the reasons at some point, stay 🐟.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.
My days are consolidating into piano, work, VR, piano, sleep, loop
This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.
Sweet, sweet holidays.
Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post: I read very little.
This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer
The video edition
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
The last of 2020.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
This is a short edition.
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
This is a bit late because I have automated something.
I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.
I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual 🤣
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
An early one: For the first time in… not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.
The lack of commute is very hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading/writing time.
The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.
The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.
No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.
Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.
Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).
Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.
First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.
On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any particular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional programming and containers, project management, aviation history, interviews/bios… I have started reading a few more papers, and I’ll share the interesting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with 400+ articles. I “trimmed” it down to “only” 380 during this week, I had a lot of airport time due to going to Spark Summit Europe to give a talk.
Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random bits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this week, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
Heavy focus on Python’s asyncio this week. Also, one of the best books of the
year.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
_This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019 in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks. _
Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Tag: recipes
Thermometers are already hitting 29°C with temperature feelings around 32 or 33. It’s this time of the year when I need cold drinks to keep me alive. I’m not a big soda fan (except when I’m on Finland in the Nordic Go Academy camp, they are so stocked on soda that I’m dragged in,) so my go-to drink is usually freshly squeezed lemonade with some ice cubes and sometimes a pinch of soda to make it fizz (and make it less acid.
Tag: remote
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
Tag: research
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing.
Tag: rust
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
Sweet, sweet holidays.
As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with 400+ articles. I “trimmed” it down to “only” 380 during this week, I had a lot of airport time due to going to Spark Summit Europe to give a talk.
A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks tasty.
If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
Tag: scala
This turned out a long one
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
Happy new year!
Christmas edition!
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.
Days of fire Kafka and thunder SSL.
This Apache Spark feature has made us scratch our heads way too much.
A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
Next week I start a new job 😮
I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.
I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper.
I have dropped the Weekly from the title. It was about time.
We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.
This is a project recap on writing some non-super-trivial Haskell for the first time.
I should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉
A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter… so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.
Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona organised PyDay 2019, and I was one of the organisers aside from giving a workshop on PySpark, so I felt pretty tired on Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.
This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of Haskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random stuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).
A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala stuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.
This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and Scala. There’s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore developers more than usual.
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package.
As you may know, I’m a heavy emacs user, and a frequent Scala developer. Scala tooling for emacs was restricted to mostly ensime until recently. Although ensime is an excellent piece of software, it made my old Macbook suffer a lot (it only had 8gb of RAM). So, most of the time I just went hardcore mode developer, and worked with no autocompletion, no jump to definition, no-nothing. A pervasive use of ripgrep and good memory were sometimes enough, but I was envious of many things I could see in my colleagues using IntelliJ. Of course, switching editors was not an option.
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo’s, and The Day The Music Died as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames (the successor of GraphX on Spark).
I ran into this problem with sbt dependency resolution around 7 weeks ago. I
was in a hurry, so I commented out the offending import (since it was not in the
subproject I was working on, so was not needed for the run I was in) sent my
commit to the heavens and CircleCI was happy.
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
A few months ago I stumbled into the problem of Akka logging, specifically
ClassNotFoundException when using akka.event.slf4j.Slf4jLoggingFilter, just by
following the details of the Logging - SL4J section of Akka
documentation.
Almost two months ago (time sure flies) I attended for the second time the conference Scala eXchange, one of the largest Scala conferences in the world, and which happens to be 1 tube stop from the office you can find me from time to time in London.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Shading dependencies with sbt-assembly (in particular, shapeless in Spark 2.1.0)
1 minutes read | 141 words
A few weeks ago I needed to parse configuration files in Scala for a Spark project and decided to use PureConfig. It is incredibly lean to use, needing minimal boilerplate. I recommend you check it out (give also a look at CaseClassy, which I haven’t had time to test yet).
Everything seemed straightforward enough, and I got it working pretty quickly (as in, it compiled properly). The surprise? spark-submit failed with a conflict with Shapeless (lacking a witness).
Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.
At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year
Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.
October Kafka London Meetup - Jay Kreps: Distributed stream processing with Apache Kafka
2 minutes read | 263 words
This has been the first time I could attend the Apache Kafka meetup in London. Previous meetings had me in Barcelona or flying. First realisation: it is a surprisingly crowded meetup! Clearly, everyone is using Kafka, even if it is not clear from the outside. Oh, and the food was pretty good, too. Thanks to the sponsor (which I have sadly forgotten).
I really enjoyed this one. The speaker was Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent (and author of I Heart Logs), so, basically, a Kafka top committer himself.
More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays)
3 minutes read | 472 words
At Affectv we use a wide range of editors: Sublime, Atom, Emacs, Pycharm, IntelliJ… Actually only two people use the same editor! As such, from time to time I see things in other people’s editors that I would like to have as well. So, yesterday I decided to improve on some configuration settings on Spacemacs.
Click for multiple-cursors I saw this on Jordi’s Sublime, and it is much more comfortable than using more-like-this or similar helper functions, even if I need to use the trackpad to do so.
Tag: seo
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Via pixelfrenzy@flickr
Beware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.
Well, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash.
If you want to read a quick overview of this in Spanish, check my post about GTM at DoctorMetrics.
Google has just unveiled a new tool: Google Tag Manager. I have spent a few hours playing with it (both before and after official release.) And it’s awesome! Or at least, it has quite a lot of awesomeness, hidden behind a seemingly simple interface.
Its main feature is the fact that you can get away with just a piece of included code.
Tag: shoemaking
_‘Of course I don’t have to do this,’ one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. ‘But look; this table’s clean.’ _ _‘Usually,’ the man said. ‘I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality… like when temples or graves or __prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing?
Tag: spacemacs
If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package.
As you may know, I’m a heavy emacs user, and a frequent Scala developer. Scala tooling for emacs was restricted to mostly ensime until recently. Although ensime is an excellent piece of software, it made my old Macbook suffer a lot (it only had 8gb of RAM). So, most of the time I just went hardcore mode developer, and worked with no autocompletion, no jump to definition, no-nothing. A pervasive use of ripgrep and good memory were sometimes enough, but I was envious of many things I could see in my colleagues using IntelliJ. Of course, switching editors was not an option.
More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays)
3 minutes read | 472 words
At Affectv we use a wide range of editors: Sublime, Atom, Emacs, Pycharm, IntelliJ… Actually only two people use the same editor! As such, from time to time I see things in other people’s editors that I would like to have as well. So, yesterday I decided to improve on some configuration settings on Spacemacs.
Click for multiple-cursors I saw this on Jordi’s Sublime, and it is much more comfortable than using more-like-this or similar helper functions, even if I need to use the trackpad to do so.
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing.
Tag: spark
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Tag: sql
A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.
This past week we were on holidays 🎉.
I had a very entertaining week.
This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.
I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian. I may write the reasons at some point, stay 🐟.
Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.
Looks like my mojo is coming back.
My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings posts will hopefully look closer to watchings. My watch-later list is at more than 90.
This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.
A relatively common type of query for time-based SQL tables is a find the gap query. How can you do this in AWS Redshift, which does not have the SQL function generate_series?
Tag: statistics
This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.
Tag: strategy
This turned out a long one
Back on track.
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
Sun Tzu
This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.
Tag: systems-thinking
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Tag: teaching
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
As I said in a previous post, I am looking for some way to detect copied code. I have now a working prototype of a “code juicer”. From a C file it creates a set of PostScript files (well, almost, as they need postprocessing) which are later processed and selected to print. As an example, here is the output applied to a Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 4-5.
It is something like an execution tree, with function calls squared, and different slopes for if, for, while clauses.
Pieces of an ENIGMA machine, from Flickr
Assume you have a set of alumni, which are due an individual programming assignment. All have the same assignment (as it is hard to come up with several), and it is hard enough that copying from each other passes for everyone’s mind. As a teacher, how do you detect this?
From my point of view, there are fundamentally two different kinds of copy:
Tag: testing
Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.
Tag: thoughts
The links to Amazon and The Book Depository are affiliate links. If you purchase like 50 copies I may afford a coffee :D
From Flickr
It all started after reading If you can’t choose, pick at random at Aeon.co. It delves into how choosing at random can be best in some cases. Give it a read, it is interesting. Among the HackerNews comments about this submission there were some mentions about choosing at random in real life, and to the novel The Dice Man (Amazon | Book Depository).
Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it… But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search.
Beware, in what follows I rant. All figures come from Wikipedia or similar and are expressed with many zeroes and also in written form to make clear what a billion may be.
If you are a regular reader of mostlymaths.net, you’ll be aware that I don’t write a lot about current subjects. In fact, I actively try not to write about what’s going on at the moment, one notable exception may be a post I wrote about Mesut Özil’s stellar debut in the 2010 World Cup.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1485 words
All hail Steve Jobs
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS.
I’ve been playing the game of Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) on and off for almost 10 years. In case you don’t know, Go is a board game with very old roots, that can be traced back to at least 2500 years ago, probably a lot more. Very popular in Japan (known as Go or Igo), Korea (baduk) and China (weiqi), it has been slowly spreading among the west during the last century.
This was posted to my mail newsletter a few months ago. Subscribe now if you want to receive this kind of content to your inbox. I won’t spam you, promise.
When do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can’t act upon them. While I’m falling asleep or while I’m taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I’ll remember it next morning, something that never happens.
Yesterday I did nothing. Absolutely, really nothing.
And it felt great. Before yesterday, my usual weekend was filled of what I thought was doing nothing, but far from it. I wrote posts, programmed, read a lot online and caught up with what was going in the A-List Blogger Club forum. Did some laundry, folded the clothes. All this (well, except for the laundry part) under the assumption that doing what you love does not tire you.
From my cheap dictionary
As a byproduct of The Language Switch, I was invited to send a guest post to Bitesize Irish Gaelic, a wonderful site where you can learn Irish gaelic online.
Last year I decided to learn Icelandic because we were going to Iceland, this year I was learning Gaelic… Thus we decided that Ireland might be a good place to visit this summer on holidays, encouraging me to learn better this new language.
Next week is the final exam of the course I’m giving, Numerical Analysis. Classes finished before Christmas, and this week is for students questions. I had one of these sessions this morning, when a pair of students came with a few questions related to the problems I solved on the blackboard.
All were quick to solve, until one simple question arose, concerning a trivial problem in Calculus 1 (or Analysis 1, as we name it here).
During this week you will hear and read a lot about New Year’s resolutions. Questions like what do you want to change in your life for the next year and what good habits do you want to build next year are assumed to be always in your mind now. And they should, but not just now.
New Year is only a psychological landmark, and a very bad one. Something like 70% of those good intentions you had while the previous year was ending fade into oblivion before February 1st.
From morguefile
It’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.
But you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place.
From Yassin Hassan@Flickr
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One may say that to be a winner you have to be disciplined, commited, hard-worker, have a thirst for the win. But what a winner has almost always behind are countless failures, terrible defeats and fatal blunders.
The topic for this post has been jumping on and off from my mind for a few weeks, and what prompted me to finally write it was a very recent post by Gabriel Weinberg, web entrepeneur and CEO of the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo.
Hey! Look! A squirrel!
GillesGonthier@Flickr
A few weeks ago I realised I was procrastinating too much. I tend to work in cycles, and it looked like my productive cycle was over and my procrastinator half had just kicked in the worse possible moment: lectures had just begun.
It looked like there was no solution. My timeboxing strategies went nowhere, will-do lists (litemind.com) had no real meaning, carrot-and-stick solutions didn’t work.
Stairs to Macchu Pichu,
courtesy of Shanidar
I just realised why I procrastinate in some tasks. And it may also be why you do, read on! It is not because they are boring, hard or repetitive. They may be. Hard tasks are a measure of your strength, boring and repetitive tasks, of your stamina. No, the problem is another.
Some projects are just tombstones. There are certain huge projects, with hardness and boredom along the way that when they are done, they are dead.
Two weeks ago it was the beginning of this years lectures. Currently I’m solving problems in the blackboard, 2 hours per week and take care of one computer lab (programming in C, but they have already done a C programming course and another course of numerical computations with C), all for our Numerical Analysis course (7th semester). This is the same schedule I had 3 years ago, also last year I had one computer lab each semester.
A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
I have a problem: I know quite a lot different programming languages (you can read my list of the best 9 books I have read about programming), but I am proficient only in two. I’d love to choose a few to concentrate and build my skills up, but I don’t know which. Read on for background and possible candidates.
Since I discovered there were different programming languages, I’ve liked learning different ones.
Preface: I have been using Linux since around 1998, when I installed Debian from scratch in my old Pentium II. I am more end-user than power user, but the computer I use most often (my netbook) has Linux in it by default. Also, my office computer is a Linux computer. And I am writing this in my MacBook. Which is not Linux, but at least it is Unix. What comes now is a personal rant, after a fight with my netbook.
Most of you may not know who Vladimir Arnold (Владимир Арнольд, also written as Vladimir Arnol’d) was, but for me his death on 3rd June 2010,was some kind of landmark. I own two books by him (Mathematical aspects of classical and celestial mechanics [1] and Mathematical methods of classical mechanics [2]), and are quite high in my list of most checked books, at least when I was starting my journey into the realm of dynamical systems.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
Life logging, journaling… what now? The idea behind this post grew from an insight I had, two months ago. I realised that I was bookmarking a lot of web pages because I liked what they explained and wanted to remember what I read. More precisely, I wanted to remember that I had read that. At that time, this seemed the more natural way to approach this problem.
A month later, more or less, I landed in this New York times article: The Data-Driven Life.
As I promised in my previous post reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer, here I collect 8 reader reasons for re-inventing the wheel from comments on the reddit thread and on page comments. They are in no particular order AFAIK.
You need a faster wheel: Embedded software is the prime example of such. Average 10 cycles, worst case 15 cycles is not good when your system can explode if you do not attain 14 cycles at most.
The ‘broken windows theory’ is a widely known theory, based on folks knowledge (which have been also tested in real life).
Consider a building with a broken window. If this window does not get repaired, other windows can break (over time, or by vandalism). In the long run, someone may break into the building, becoming a squatter.
Or a more usual situation. If some litter gets accumulated in a sidewalk or a lot, soon more litter will accumulate, until people start leaving whole bags of trash.
Has someone ever told you “Don’t re-invent the wheel”? Again and again I read somewhere around the net that ’re-inventing the wheel' is one of the worse errors a programmer can fall into. In fact, I’ve read it so often that the only thought of doing it makes me re-think over and over other ways of solving (or ignoring) the problem.
But here, I advocate my pro’s (the cons can be found elsewhere) for re-inventing the wheel, or at least not being frightened of it.
My backlog of things happening is quickly filling, faster than I can even keep track of it. Just a quick overview
Summer trip to Iceland This summer we are going to Iceland for 17 days. It is some kind of tour-trip, where we have arranged accomodation and car rental and we just have to keep en route around the island to sleep where arranged each day. As an addition to this…
It had to happen sooner or later. This blog has been open, with a somewhat regular publication in English since March 2008, more or less a year ago. Before that, it was more sporadic, and used to be in Catalan, just to output some ideas or share a picture with a friend.
And the day had to come. To celebrate this approximate anniversary, I’m moving to my own domain and preparing a new look that will appear in about two weeks.
It is a widely accepted theory that the use of tools determined the development of the human brain. Nowadays, using tools is thus a quite common endeavor everybody does.
But ask a carpenter if he would use a jagged saw, or a draftsman a broken pencil. It is not only using the tools, but using the best tools.
But what is for the best tools? Using the best possible tools is not enough: you need to love your tools.
The pleasure and pain of time management In this post I’ll review some time management systems to get the most out of your workday. Of course, keep in mind that you also should have rest time.
Start strong Start your day doing some work for at least half an hour straight. You can do this at home, before leaving yo your office (if you usually spend at least 1h between getting up and leaving) or just on arriving to your office.
Maybe you remember my previous post about detection of copied assignments? Well, now I can say it succeeded. CJuicer is a flex script, generating a lexycal analyzer with a rudimentary parser of C code, it outputs a PostScript with the “logical tree” of loops, function calls and conditionals. Same trees, copied assignment (unless it is simple code, then almost everyone writes the same), without problems with changing names of variables. Thus it could beat diff.
Lena Söderberg
I am working in my free time in an image processing related program, and this made me remember when I was taking a course in Signal Processing. One of the standard test images was the one above. Where does this historical image processing snippet come from?
Turns out (wikipedia link) it is a standard folklore image, dating back to the seventies, when a bunch of electrical engineers needed an image satisfying certain signal problems (it is, indeed, an image with a lot of significative details, when compressing, denoising or whatever: the hat, the uniform colour distribution except for a few patches of different color…).
Pieces of an ENIGMA machine, from Flickr
Assume you have a set of alumni, which are due an individual programming assignment. All have the same assignment (as it is hard to come up with several), and it is hard enough that copying from each other passes for everyone’s mind. As a teacher, how do you detect this?
From my point of view, there are fundamentally two different kinds of copy:
With Sketchbook Mobile
The concepts of “future”, “job stability” or even “location” are quite fuzzy when in Mathematics. I think I don’t know any PhD student who knows what he will be doing in 3 years, what he will be working on (not what he will be researching, but working…) or even where he will be.
1-2 years of Master+Master thesis
2-6 years of PhD thesis (3-4 years PhD grant+maybe some associated professor, 1-4 years)
Last weekend I attended a conference in Denmark, and a colleague I met there showed me the logo of his University. It is supposed to be a coral… but he said in every party they turn it 270º, so it is the “angry elk”.
Related postsParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
Conference for 4 days in an old army place. Really nice, well kept and bought by the university. But away from everything, and everyone. And today my head hurts a lot… Maybe I should go to sleep now (2332). Tomorrow I have a really tight schedule… lot of work to do… And I’m feeling tired.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
Taken from Flickr
Sometimes I view mathematical knowledge as a desert. Full of sand, some pebbles, some rocks. You can get easily lost in this dry sea, but you can also find a place to stay and add. And now, I can say I have added my small grain of sand: An entire transcendental family with a persistent Siegel disc (link to the preprint version in ArXiV). My first article, now officially “Awaiting Editorial Assistant Processing”.
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Sometimes I feel like a character from a RPG (or NetHack), where you have a certain level and experience, and as you advance killing monsters, your experience points go up, your level eventually rises and your enemies turn harder.
I guess life (or at least a mathematician’s life while doing his thesis) is more or less like this… Enemies appear, you overcome them, and as you advance, they get stronger, bigger and thicker.
Tag: time-management
The year has ended, what has been going on?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Snickerdoodles!
Do you have problems to keep motivated? Is your usual to-do list filled with great hopes of accomplishing 20 things? Do you dump it when you are wasted at 11 AM after finishing just the first 5 things? Of course, you are not alone. This is a very common thing, from freelancers to researchers, or to almost anyone managing their own time. But this can be due to eating radishes instead of chocolate chip cookies.
Using Taskwarrior Instead Of Emacs+Org Mode For To-Do And Appointment Tracking
6 minutes read | 1189 words
One of my fractal images
I have a confession to make: I’m not using emacs+org mode to keep my to-do list and appointments. What? The same emacs junkie that used emacs for (almost) everything last December gave up emacs? Yes, the same, but only gave up for this use case. I have some good reasons about why I am using TaskWarrior. Which does not mean that I could not be using emacs for the same, I just wanted to try something new.
Since I can remember, I’ve always tried to bite more than I could chew. Every time I’m stressed, or overworked I end up adding one or two new projects. I don’t know how. I try to pick up a new language, or start to play go again, or decide it is a good moment to learn stenography. These days, for example, added to my usual schedule are a new blog about meditation, I finally started the series on our road trip to Iceland and I am fighting my schedule to learn Gaelic.
This is the notebook where I keep my to-do list, like the one you can see in the picture in Book Review: Do It Tomorrow. A quick and cheap way to have a small multi-page notebook you can keep always with you. Of course, calling this origami is a small lie, as you have to use scissors.
I read a very good post about going the analog way (How analog rituals can amp your productivity) and this was my tool.
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
Office mess. Yes.
That’s a Julia set in my wall
A pile of papers to read on the side. A stack of notes for several unrelated projects. Assignments to prepare. Questions to answer by email. Inbox full of unclassified mails. Lectures to prepare. Cluttered office desktop. Cluttered computer desktop.
A few weeks ago, Friday, this was what I saw when I looked at my office desktop. And I decided it was too much to bear and filed my first Task Bankruptcy.
Hey! Look! A squirrel!
GillesGonthier@Flickr
A few weeks ago I realised I was procrastinating too much. I tend to work in cycles, and it looked like my productive cycle was over and my procrastinator half had just kicked in the worse possible moment: lectures had just begun.
It looked like there was no solution. My timeboxing strategies went nowhere, will-do lists (litemind.com) had no real meaning, carrot-and-stick solutions didn’t work.
Stairs to Macchu Pichu,
courtesy of Shanidar
I just realised why I procrastinate in some tasks. And it may also be why you do, read on! It is not because they are boring, hard or repetitive. They may be. Hard tasks are a measure of your strength, boring and repetitive tasks, of your stamina. No, the problem is another.
Some projects are just tombstones. There are certain huge projects, with hardness and boredom along the way that when they are done, they are dead.
What? Biology and time management? Limiting factors? Okay, take it easy. First, let’s read this Wikipedia entry:
A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population, size, or distribution. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rainforest, where growth is limited to all plants in the understory unless more light becomes available.
Music to listen with this post: Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsvkii’s Concert 35 D-major, Allegro (Spotify link , Youtube link). I’ll write why this piece in a forthcoming post.
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If you are new here, have a look around and if you like what you find, don’t forget to subscribe.
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A week and a half ago, @nochiel, a twitter follower retweeted the following, initially written by @marcoarment (lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper):
Tag: tla+
Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Testing and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points.
Software/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
Tag: trick
Change the parameters of a docker container without knowing the docker run command used
3 minutes read | 466 words
I’m not sure how useful this Docker “trick” is, since it happens in a very niche situation.
At work, we have several instances running a suite of Docker containers, with some non-trivial amount of environment variables, port configurations, volumes and links among them. This is set up really easily using ansible: writing link/port/volume mappings in ansible (using the docker, container or docker-container modules, depending how long ago we set it up).
Tag: trips
The year has ended, what has been going on?
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the sixth (and last) post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fifth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
Iceland’s Water: the Best Water in the World
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the fourth post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
How Is Iceland’s Weather?
If I had to gamble before going to Iceland, I would have thought tap water would be horrible.
The Sun street
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the third post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
Eating in Iceland (if you are not an Icelander)
Road Trip Through Iceland
Weather is not as bad as you may expect.
re
Iceland is one of the few places
where you can park inside a
volcano
As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. You can read the day-by-day exploration with plenty of pictures by browsing the tag Iceland, which accounts our road trip. This is the second post in the series Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. If you came here directly don’t forget to read the previous post in this series
This is a picture I shot in Iceland, in the Dynjandi Waterfall. If a caption is needed, it would be Never give up. Click the thumbnails to download the high resolution images.
Dynjandi Waterfalls
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As you may remember, Laia and me spent three weeks in Iceland for holidays two months ago. This is the first post in the series Things you should read about before travelling to Iceland. Be sure to stay tuned for the following posts!
First I would like to say you one thing about Iceland’s food: don’t be scared! They don’t eat anything odd, except for a few national foods which are not that usual: hákari (rotten shark meat) and hrutspungar (pickled ram testicles).
Interesting things to know before going to Iceland As you may remember, Laia and myself went to Iceland for a 2 and half weeks trip last June-July. It was a wonderful experience, managed by the wonderful (and helpful!) people at Nordic Visitor. This is the first post in a series named Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. In these posts I will cover the following (I will add links to the individual posts here as I write them, bookmark this page!
Being a copilot in Iceland can be either stressing or boring. It depends if you are going to an almost unmarked farm where you will spend the night or just in the middle of an unending straight road. And in the boredom moments, I decided to compile a list of things we had packed and were really useful. I hope this helps you in your next trip!
Fishing line: Fishing line is quite useful for several things.
Today I am leaving on holiday… Destination: Iceland. It is funny, because we arranged everything (accomodation, car rental and such) just two weeks before Eyjafjallajökull started spitting ash. It have been a few months wondering whether we could make it to Iceland and come back… Fortunately the little volcano took a pause and here we go.
I have a few scheduled posts for this few weeks (I’ll be back around 16th July) but I will be again posting more frequently after I am back.
The 100 most common words in Icelandic, automatically generated from Wikipedia
3 minutes read | 556 wordsThe file can be downloaded at the end of the post
As you may already know, I’m travelling to Iceland this July, and started learning Icelandic a few months ago. It advances slowly but firmly, but I found a problem:when you are self-learning a new language, an invaluable tool is a list of most common words.
København, Denmark
Related posts:
ParseList(ScrambleList(Relateds(Maths)),5)
From flickr
September is to months as Monday is to weekdays
September is again here, like a new year in more than a sense. I have no new “New Year’s promises”, since the beginning of the year. In fact, most of the things I wanted to do are already done, on the way to be done or I gave up. Well, let’s summarize what I shall do these three months to end 2009
While on Paris, I spotted several Space Invaders. Sadly, I wasn’t aware enough, as there are plenty.
I love the smell of old (really old, but not dusty) books. It reminds me of some kind of vanilla scent, that is only to be found in them. I smelled it a few weeks ago, when I bought Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, second hand 1972 Penguin Modern Classics edition (3€) in a second hand bookstore in Göttingen (Germany).
Princeps Mathematicorum
Old 10 Deutsche Mark banknote. Gauss depicted along with a normal distribution and 5 historical buildings in Göttingen. The most visible, St. Jacobi’s Church (Jacobikirsche).
Tag: vim
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
Text editors. You hate them or love them. Praise them with religious zeal, and attack them with the same power. I’ve been an emacs user for the last 8 years, getting as deep as I could without checking the source. And the past few months I have started using evil-mode in emacs, to get some taste of vim in my daily editing (mostly text objects.)
There’s still a third contestant in editor-land, for me.
The links to Practical Vim are affiliate links to Amazon. Beware!
So… last January I was in a flight to London, preparing for an intense, 12 days course on traditional shoemaking (English hand-welted shoes, improving our knowledge at The Fancy Puffin.) And my flight read was Practical Vim. Most of my readers are already aware I’m an emacs guy, so the main question is why?
I love knowing many tools.
Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Image copyrighted by Lucent Technologies, hosted by Wikimedia Commons and posted here for information purposes
A few months ago I wrote about how I’m using vim in my ipad. You know, I’m an emacs guy, just started writing my own (useful) stuff to improve it. Recently I finished gnusnotes.el, a package which allows you to easily add notes to emails. Of course, before this I had already written emacs code, just that it was only for me.
Tag: visualization
I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The
Processing
Handbook and
Visualizing
Data
some years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a
short amount of time with processing.js something around 2011 (there was a
native processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and
iPod Touch).
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Using Gephi with Google Analytics to visualize keywords and landing pages
6 minutes read | 1087 words
As of late, I’ve been playing a lot with data analysis and visualization tools. Recently I’ve read two interesting books (Statistical Analysis with R and Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics and I’m on my way to another two to refresh my statistics knowledge.
But this post is only mildly related to these books, since it started way before: the day I read about Gephi. Gephi is an open source graph visualization tool, to work with huge (or at least big) datasets and graphs.
Tag: vs-code
So, you want to debug some Go in VS Code. And maybe setup some Docker containers with services before? How the hell do you configure that?
Tag: wardley-maps
Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
Sun Tzu
The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant and Ben Mosior (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel). I’m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments.
Tag: watch
This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames (the successor of GraphX on Spark).
Tag: writing
This has been a really tough week.
I was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.
A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.
End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time
Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I have tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one article.
Tag: zio
Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.
I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot and reading another lot. It went from 369 items to 99 🎉